pstarr wrote:They are drama queens and hopeful wealthy-wannabees. Believe if they tow the line, then they will earn the prize. Scared of poverty. Handmaidens of the wealthy.
Ya you're right there pstarr. It's a quirk of psychology -- empathy gets blocked because people are SCARED of it, as if somehow by empathizing or helping the vulnerable they could end up the same way. Hard to explain.. but it's why people turn away from those in need, it's why they don't care about the hungry and poor or sick and old. And yet it really can happen to them too, because they are human we're all liable to get old decrepit, drooling and senile. If we live long enough.
Now it's so bad we're not even talking about taking away charity here, but just regular retirement pension benefits.
The gov is saying we live a long time now, but in my family nobody went much past 80. I look around me.. far younger folks aren't looking too healthy. Childhood obesity and diabetes is an epidemic. And these are the people who will theoretically be living to 100 and can all work full time jobs at 79 years old?
By the way, it's actually good for the mind and body to work as long as possible. But folks need their SS they paid into it, raising that age is just wrong.
At minimum you'd need a health exemption, some 75 year olds are DAMN OLD, it kind of varies. Where I live old folks who can work DO work, because they enjoy it, and for many SS is supplement anyway they must work part time. But as they get older it's like 10 hours a week crossing guard, or McDonalds or Walmart greeter, all part time.
They need their pension check to make up the difference, they cannot work as hard as a 20 or 30 year old man.I found that NYT article, wasn't by Krugman:
Get Radical: Raise Social Security
By THOMAS GEOGHEGAN
AS a labor lawyer I cringe when Democrats talk of “saving” Social Security. We should not “save” it but raise it. Right now Social Security pays out 39 percent of the average worker’s preretirement earnings.
While jaws may drop inside the Beltway, we could raise that to 50 percent. We’d still be near the bottom of the league of the world’s richest countries — but at least it would be a basement with some food and air. We have elderly people living on less than $10,000 a year. Is that what Democrats want to “save”?...
If people are willing to pay more just to “save” Social Security, they should be glad to pay more to raise it.
What does it take to get Social Security up to half the average worker’s earnings? According to the National Academy of Social Insurance, to close the deficit and raise benefits to nearly half of average worker earnings, we would need to find an additional 5 percent of taxable payroll, or find the money elsewhere.
If we lift the cap on the payroll tax without paying more benefits to those above it, that gets us 2.32 percent (or a bit less if we slightly increase benefits to the rich). Dedicating revenues from the estate tax at its 2009 levels to Social Security gets another half percent. A few other tweaks, like covering new public employees, add another 0.42 percent. The remainder can be found by raising the payroll tax by roughly 1 percentage point for both employees and employers.I can hear the argument: It will discourage jobs, blah, blah. While I sympathize with the health costs employers pay (I am an employer, at our tiny law firm), they have had a windfall on pensions. In 1975, when I left law school, around two-fifths of American workers were in defined-benefit plans. Now it’s just a fifth, and dropping. For employers, that’s not the real bonanza.
Retirees today are shortchanged on Social Security because they have been shortchanged on wages for their entire working lives. The labor economist Richard B. Freeman points out that the hourly earnings of workers dropped by 8 percent from 1973 to 2005 while productivity shot up 55 percent or more.
The United States is one of the few developed countries where workers are routinely cheated of a share in higher productivity.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/opinion/20geoghegan.html
Gotta agree with that.
We could go into entropic collapse smiling and holding hands instead of creating scapegoats and enemies. But until then, I have mine; Rethuglicans.
Creationists want to end it now. It's their religion.
Bingo. If peak oil collapse doom is so cool, let's tax the rich let them enjoy it too. Why should we have all the fun, right?
