That’s a bit unfair, since Dave Lindorff (This Can’t be Happening blog) isn’t exactly the kind of person you’d label a boomer. He says he’s turned 62. Even so, in this world of squirming, equivocating politicians and their Oh-so-smart expert slide rule advisors, his is a voice of passion about real things in real life. Such a relief after reading, or should I say, trying to read, all the sychophant journalists with their two bit sermons about how broke we are and how we all have to sacrifice. Do these guys seriously think this country is poor?
Here’s a bit of Lindorff:
But here’s the thing. The reason these parties and lobbies are trying so hard now to use the recession and the national deficit as cover to decimate and destroy these two proven and critically important social programs into which all working Americans have been paying all our working lives, is that they realize what most 50 and 60-something Americans haven’t realized yet: that we are about to become the most powerful political force in the country, and that we are certainly going to demand both an excellent government Medicare program, and a decent retirement program.
The way I see it, we in the Baby Boom generation–those people born between 1946 and about 1964–are just starting to hit retirement age. In another 10 years, we will become a political force twice as powerful and certainly more than twice as noisy and demanding as the current senior lobby. We can either wait until then, after they have successfully gutted the two programs we depend on, making it so we have to fight to recreate or restore them, or we can start organizing now to defend and improve them, and save ourselves a whole lot of trouble.
Lindorff’s proposal, invoking what the Washington Post sneerlingly refers to as “common sense.”
Let’s start building a coalition of Baby Boomers, working through every conceivable organization–labor unions, churches, veterans organizations, alumni organizations, political chapters, etc.–with one goal: Defending and improving Social Security and Medicare.
Here’s the argument. Social Security is said to be in danger of “running out of money” in 2037, because there will supposedly be too many retirees drawing checks and too few younger workers putting money into the so-called Trust Fund. The Trust Fund itself had its trust broken by our politicians, Republican and Democrat, who have for years been raiding the money we put into it, leaving us with government IOUs. These IOUs, the Republicans and the corporatists now say, they don’t intend to honor. (The main reason for these raids has been to fund America’s imperialist wars, which the public never would support if they had to pay for them up front through higher taxes.) Well, first off, we need to demand that they honor those IOUs. Second, since that would mean raising taxes to fund our retirement, we need to demand that the money come not from our working kids and grandkids, but from the rich. It’s really an easy fix. Require that the FICA tax which pays for Social Security benefits apply to all income, not just the first $106,000 of income, and make it also apply to investment income, which currently pays no FICA tax. (I’m not talking about retirement investments. They can be exempted. I’m talking about regular taxable investment income.)
As for Medicare, which we’re told is going to run out of money sometime before 2017, the answer there is to stop making it a program just for disabled and old people, and to expand it to cover everyone, which is what President Obama should have proposed way back in 2008, instead of the outrageous health “reform” that was pushed through Congress and which is going to be undone by the courts anyhow.
