Well, there’s always euthanasia as a solution…
Holly: For every expert who states that SS is healthy and everything will be hunkey-dorey, another expert says just the opposite: that the SS stockpile consists entirely of IOU’s and is a house of cards. I may be being unrealistic, but I don’t think I’m grossly unrealistic. I insist I’m not ignorant on the issue, either; I’ve done quite a bit of reading on the subject.
Fair enough, and I apologize for calling you ignorant. But since all the “experts” I have heard predicting the impending demise of Social Security seem to be people heavily involved in market investing—in other words, people who have a great deal to gain in the short term from having many billions of dollars in public funds pumped into the market—I’m still skeptical about the extent to which real “expert opinion” is actually divided on this.
*If you neglect to save towards your retirement, does society have the responsibility to support you for the rest of your life? *
What I’m suspicious of in this sort of question is the false dichotomy it implies: namely, either we decide to be suckers and spend money to support the retirement of people who didn’t plan ahead to support themselves, or we tell them to hose off and save our money. But it doesn’t really work out that way. As labdude points out, even the no-goodniks will still be around and we’ll have to deal with them. And it’s not just a question of whether we can bring ourselves to be as cheerfully callous as young arl and simply ignore the fact that our cities are starting to look like Calcutta, either: people on the streets, especially elderly ones, cost a lot in real terms. There’s the expenses of the emergency medical treatment that most ERs still will provide (and which is a lot more costly in the case of the serious medical problems developed by the homeless elderly with no regular medical care), there’s the increase in crime and policing and sanitation needs (and whoever’s job it is to clean up the corpses), the loss of revenue from potential tourists and residents who are more squeamish than arl about walking around a Western Calcutta, and so forth. Even leaving humanity and sympathy out of the equation entirely, the question is not so much “should we resolve not to spend our money on old people who didn’t take heed for the future?” as “will we really save any money by not contributing to the support of these old people, and will it be enough to make the degradation of our community life worth it?”
Kimstu:
The majority of homeless people are mentally ill, elderly or not. The lack of adequate mental health care for chronically mentally ill people is another topic for discussion.
Maybe it does work out that way; maybe it doesn’t. Another potentially false dichotomy is this: if we don’t financially support elderly people, many will wind up on the streets.
If we don’t financially support elderly people, perhaps more people will save for retirement, and/or perhaps their families will feel more of an obligation to help them.
But there will still be unfortunate people who have had their savings wiped out through no fault of their own. One can argue about how many people actually fall into this category, but there must be some (especially given our health care system). There are also people who will enjoy a comfortable retirement because they have ill-gotten wealth (tax cheats and other white collar criminals). Does this bother you too?
The “punishment” for not saving for retirement is exactly as you state in the OP: you’re forced to scrape by on a measly social security check. Seems fair to me. You want to take even this away?
Let me put in my meager $0.02.
I hear stories of of how Grandma is barely making it on SS. I ask where is the family? Why do we assume that the Government must take up the slack for the lack of planning or bad luck? Why do not these families provide assistance for Grandma?
As Americans we have developed an independent nature and we feel we must live separate lives away from and not concerned about a family unit. The younger generation has developed into self-centered individuals who do not want to be bothered with caring for their elders. Independence should not be substituted for family values. We should stop depending on SS to provide all of the $$$ for retirement. Families need to bond together and not allow the elderly members to suffer poverty.
Now some will argue that these youngsters are barely making it themselves and they have a family of their own to raise. I still do not feel that this argument is good enough for egotistically ignoring the plight of another. We need to shift our thinking from the elderly being frail stupid individuals to thinking of them as the holders of wisdom that must be gleaned from their experience. The care of them will then change from being an albatross around our necks to a garden that needs to be carefully tended in winter.
- Kimutsu, etc.: It’s true that under current projections, social security is unlikely to remain solvent indefinitely; the Greenspan commission of the early 1980s merely postponed the day of reckoning.
OTOH, that merely means that when that day arrives taxes will have to be raised (a lot) or benefits cut (a lot). It doesn’t mean that social security disappears.
- Because the currently old are provided for and Gen X isn’t, social security is often portrayed as a big rip-off. Perhaps. But one of the selling points in the 1930s was that social security protected the offspring of those parents who were unlucky or lacked the foresight to save sufficiently for their retirement.
The previous system was criticized as unfair since it saddled certain individuals who, through no fault of their own, had unlucky or spendthrift parents.
As a thirty-something, both hubby and I have great 401(k)/403(b) plans with our respective companies. I also have an IRA that we try to contribute to. We are trying to pay off our outstanding debts (i.e. credit cards and such) and make do with what we have and save for what we need.
However, in all this, I fully expect to have to house, clothe and feed at least one parent of ours sometime in our lives. My family places a high value on responsibility to family ties and this is one that, despite the bother that it will be, I can only see as a repayment for everything they’ve done for me up to that point.
There are also families where they just have doggone bad karma and their life sucks - bad things happening to good people, so to speak.
On the other hand, America, as a society, is addicted to the immediate gratification bug and have generally lost the idea that “things” seem to mean more when you save up for them. We are big spenders, regardless if we have the money, wanting to keep up with the Joneses, MTV, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue. You know the people; their justification for buying something unneeded is “I can afford the monthly payments.” Yeah, until they lose their job, have the car accident, and their daughter gets pregnant at 15.
Anthracite, you go girl!
My feelings as well. You should just hear some of the contrived ways these people will attempt to justify their insane purchases:
The co-worker who bought $4500 in new furniture 2 years after spending about $3000 on the same furniture: “It was tan, and we painted the room white. What?”
The co-worker at a previous job, receiving Federal Aid for being “too poor” :rolleyes:, on their purchase of a $2500 satelite dish system: “This way, the baby can watch cartoons from all over the World, and learn other languages.”
The co-worker who just bought a brand new Ford Expedition: “To keep the baby safe.”
And, probably my favorite, the co-worker who informed me last year that after 12 years at work he had saved $0 (zero) in his 401k, and thus has no retirement (he also does not contribute the pathetically small amount required to get a huge amount of company-sponsored life insurance either):
“You just don’t understand, Una. People like me have this thing called fun. We buy things that are fun. We don’t sit around and work all the time and go “oh no, I need to save for when I’m a hundred! Boo hoo!” Fuck it - I plan on dying long before I’m 65.” I guess he’s taking his wife and kids with him. :rolleyes:
If so many presently elderly people (most of whom lived frugally, even if they didn’t manage to save much) are in such financial trouble, what will happen when an entire generation retires with no savings and nothing more than a stack of bills? There are only so many positions available as WalMart greeter.
I’m continually astonished by what I perceive as wasteful spending among my peers. My sister-in-law has a hot tub, on which she will pay $100 per month until approximately the end of time, yet she has not a dime in savings. When her daughter set her house on fire (unintentionally, we presume ;)) she quite her job and lived off of the $20,000 insurance money she received. Woo-hoo! Free money! She was rich!
Sure, may people struggle to get by. My husband and I survived by eating nothing more than rice (5 cents per pound at the food salvage store), popcorn (the kind you cook in a pot on the stove, not the prepackaged microwave kind), margarine, flour, and sugar for three years. My husband lost 35 pounds and was quite skeletal, though he was a restaurant manager. I lost about 30 pounds; my weight loss wasn’t as drastic because I had a “meal” of margarine, sugar, and flour almost every day. His employees routinely brought us sacks of canned goods. We bought milk, but didn’t drink it because it was reserved for the baby, who should have been drinking formula, but formula cost $10 per can and we couldn’t afford it. We used cloth diapers, naturally, and washed them by hand. Financially, we qualified for WIC but couldn’t receive it because the program required me to attend regular meetings and I didn’t have a car- so I was SOL. I tried working outside the home, but had to quit when I realized my child care costs exceeded my income.
On the other hand, we know many people who waste everything they own on crap. Clothes, which they deem out-of-style within a few months, even if the price tags are still intact. Food, which means eating out several times per week. (My husband and I eat out maybe once every year; I reason that if I’m going to pay $25.00 to buy two cheap pizzas, I’d rather make better pizzas at home for a dollar or else buy everyone a T-bone steak and grill them at home.)
I have one child who is severely handicapped. We are forever grateful to the Dallas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children (who will receive a large contribution from us sometime in the future), but otherwise we’ve financed the ordeal ourselves.
Movies? In our eleven-year marriage, we’ve seen about three movies in the theater. We’ve taken exactly one “real” vacation, though we’ve taken the kids camping a few times and enjoyed every second of it.
So many people have no clue what it really means to be poor that they don’t realize the importance of saving. I’ll tell you what: after all I’ve done to ensure my family’s financial security, I damn well won’t want to finance retirement for anyone who threw their money away.
The question is not “should” we take care of these people, it is who will have the nerve to go ahead and let them perish.
Sure, you could look at some elderly folks and find that they were grasshoppers all of their lives and never bothered to plan for the future. But are you going to let grandma and grandpa grasshopper starve to death? Die of exposure?
The sad truth is that we live too long and have destroyed the social structures that assured comfort in our old age. Like it or not, fair or not, there will have to be some subsistence level support from here on out.
I certainly would never let my grandma or grandpa grasshopper starve or die of exposure, no matter how stupid they were in the past, though my family is composed entirely of ants. My husband’s grasshopper parents will be welcome in our home when their meager savings run dry, though I’m sure I’ll resent it somewhat.
I’m happy to accept elderly folk into my care home, where I tend to their every need, but I don’t do it for nothing. I’ll accept poor elderly folk into my care home when the DHS reimburses me for their care. (I charge $2,500 per month, which is comparable to the cost of a nursing home, but I provide much better service.)
I’ll continue to volunteer my time and some of my resources to care for a few elderly folk I know, but I choose for myself which folk will receive my time, food, and care.
Those social structures worked much better when most people had the good sence to die a short time after stopping working. We didn’t destroy it, modern medicine did, now with people living for so long after retiring, their children can’t support the elderly until they pass in most cases. We used to have an illusion that with technology we would improve productivity enough that everybody could retire at 65, and be financed by the younger workers. That theory was seriously flawed, as we have found out. Now and who is going to pay the price for the misjudgement/deception? Do the elderly get thrown out on their asses? Do current healthy workers just get to work more and more,and pay more and more in taxes to support the infirm? Or do we start dropping school programs and younger-oriented welfare to pay for the old.
I disagree. How many of you live in a town with all of your relatives? How many live in your home town?
For most of humanity, we lived surrounded by people we knew, or were related to. Yes, living longer would stress out any system supporting the elderly, but 6 kids, and 14 grandkids living in a total of 3 houses could support the old folks better than a single mom, one kid and one house.
I think that moving into single family homes and increased mobility is more to be blamed than merely living longer.
Now, if you want to talk about paying $100,000 to keep someone alive for one extra year, I have been down that road personally, and I can safely say, we are all screwed…