Thanksgiving: Is there still a place at the table for the Middle Class?
Thanksgiving makes me think of my late father, and this year it puts me in mind as well of Paul Krugman, Hedrick Smith and Sen. Patty Murray.
Dad didn’t know any of these worthies, but in some ways he could have been a poster for them. Stay with me on this.
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Dad and mom retired at age 65 on Social Security plus sale of their house and a small nest egg from years of frugal living; age 65 could not come too soon. They were worn out, as were many of their friends who also labored in jobs requiring heavy physical work, followed in most cases by more labor on their own houses, gardens or small farms.
They were married at the start of the Great Depression, accompanied in North Dakota by drought and crop failure. The advent of Social Security gave Americans of that era a rock for retirement, even if their benefits were low — as was the case with farmers — there would be something to reward your years of hard work and ease your retirement years.
Increasingly, that promise is not there for their grandchildren (their kids got in under the wire); we live in an era of 401k's instead of fixed pensions, and politicians on the right are baying to replace Social Security with 401k's and throw their owners into the shark pool of the American financial system. Privatization of Social Security has been on the Republicans’ plate for years.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist, wrote recently in support of expanding — rather than contracting — Social Security, and he blasted the idea of sliding the retirement age from 66, at present and scheduled to go to 67, even higher, just because people live longer. “Look at exactly who is living longer,” Krugman wrote, “The rise in life expectancy, it turns out, is overwhelmingly a story about affluent, well-educated Americans. Those with lower incomes and less education have, at best, seen hardly any rise in life expectancy at age 65; in fact, those with less education have seen their life expectancy decline. So this common argument amounts, in effect, to the notion that we can’t let janitors retire because lawyers are living longer. And lower-income Americans, in case you haven’t noticed, are the people who need Social Security most.”
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http://crosscut.com/2013/11/27/social-services/117654/mckay-thanksgiving/?page=1
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