As the scaremongering begins, this is your fight too!
Let me start out with full disclosure: I'm 69 and next April I will start collecting nearly $30.000 a year in Social Security benefits -- the amount I qualify for both on the basis of my highest 35 years of work history as an employed and later self-employed journalist, and because I've waited until I hit 70, the maximum age for starting to collect benefits, before starting to receive my checks.
So it particularly galls me to read news articles about that program (and Medicare) saying things like:
New warnings about cuts to Social Security and Medicare are a reson to worry
Social Security is Running Out and Nobody Will Like the Solution
and Ryan's Retirement Won't End the Social Security Debate
Such ill-informed and often deliberately scare-mongering pieces make my blood boil, particularly because I know they, and news reports like them, are targeted at younger people, where the goal is to make them believe that Social Security is not going to be there for them, and so they should stop supporting the whole program. Take, for example, the dire stories warning that the Social Security program this year has begun drawing funds from the Social Security Trust Fund. Actually, as I explain below, that was precisely why the Trust Fund was created! It was advanced funding for that predictable time when an increase in retirees meant that more funding would be needed.
For years, the defense against a concerted drive by the right to kill Social Security by privatizing it as George Bush tried and failed to do, or to whittle it away as Barack Obama tried and failed to do in pursuing a "Grant Bargain" of benefit cuts and tax increase, has been a solid lobby of the elderly retirees who know full well how important the program is. They for years made it a "Third Rail" that politicians challenged at their own risk. But now the strategy appears to be to say, "We won't take Social Security away from current retirees or people about to retire, but younger people will have to expect something less." The other tactic is to simply do nothing to fix the system, while the cost of doing so rises with each passing year of shameless inaction.
This article is addressed to those younger Americans -- from people just starting to work on up to those in their 40s and early '50s -- because it's really you who are being conned and who need to start fighting to keep what was created for all of us, young and old, some 83 years ago. You're also the ones who are starting out as adult workers without for the most part, or the benefit of a healthy, powerful trade union movement to keep pay and benefits high. You will have a much harder time, between greater college debt, higher costs-of-living, and lower net wages and job security, building up the kind of assets your parents and grandparents had.
President Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act (1935) and President Johnson signs the Medicare Act (1965)
Here's the message: Forget all the propaganda! The reality is that Social Security is not facing an actuarial problem of too many people living too long. It's a socio-political problem: Do we as a people want to adequately fund the retirement of our elderly parents and of those suffering from disabilities or do we want to go back to an era where they ended up starving on the streets and dumpster diving, or as a burden to their children?
If we want a decent, secure old age -- and you're going to need that when you're older -- the money is there to fund it. What's needed is the political will and the collective power to demand it.
Medicare's Under Attack Too
The same can be said of Medicare and of health care in general. Do we as a society want health care to be good for those with money, and shitty or nonexistent for those without it? In the case of both programs, it's not that solutions don't exist. In most of the countries of Europe, and even many in Asia, retirement is generously funded by government programs like Social Security that are not going bankrupt even though benefit amounts paid are much higher and populations are even skewed older than here in the US. Likewise, health care is in most modern countries seen as a right and is fully funded by some kind of state-run program, while we have a jerry-rigged system that relies primarily on for-profit systems and private insurance which, taken as a whole, costs more than double as a percentage of GDP and on a per-capita basis what it costs to deliver in other countries. And state-run systems cover everyone while ours leaves tens of millions unable to see a doctor or to get timely care in a hospital.
To those who might say we as a nation cannot afford the hundreds of billions it would cost to adequately fund these vital programs, my reply is: America is currently spending two-thirds of all federal discretionary funds each year -- about $1.3 trillion a year -- on the military. That's more than the next 10 countries including China and Russia spend on their militaries. $5.5 trillion has been spent by the US just on the so-called "War on Terror" since 2001 (during which time the amount of terrorism around the globe and the number of people committing acts of mayhem have soared, which shows what a waste the whole "war" has been). And then recall that President Obama ordered, and President Trump has backed a $1-trillion 10-year program to "upgrade and modernize" America's nuclear weapons. It's a staggeringly expensive program which serves no defensive purpose and only increases the pressure on other countries to do the same and raises the chance that we -- and they -- will eventually use them.