A comment from the age barrier

Some of the online idiots whose uninformed opinion passes for truth would have one believe that I, at 65, am eligible for Social Security.

Not.

People my age, first wave of the so-called Boomers, had our full retirement age advanced to 66 a generation ago. The second round of my generation had their full retirement age hiked to 67 at the same time. Thus, in a stable political climate, and an employment climate that didn't consider people old and worthless at 45, I would have no problem with further incremental advances in the retirement age. I've never had a problem with moving up, or eliminating, the income ceiling. The latter especially could eliminate the projected Social Security deficit all by itself.

Although I do belong to AARP, I take some exception to its periodic descent into scare tactics about these and other reasonable reforms. However, I understand why they do it because they share my chief reservation.

I do not trust the shredded remains of our legislative branch. Along with millions of others, I have to assume that the majority will lie; that they will make a determined effort to eliminate the entire system, which the wingnuts have hated since it was enacted. In their ideological zeal, they are quite capable of eliminating Social Security entirely without a moment's thought to what will happen to the people who depend mostly or entirely on Social Security. They certainly won't give a damn about breaking the commitment the system represents to those people. After all, the wingnuts in particular are owned by the same corporations who promised their workers pension plans, then sold them out.

Further, any idea of continuing to increase retirement age in a reasonable way rests on the assumption that years left to live at 65 is going to go on increasing. But beware the sine wave fallacy: put simply, this is the belief that a given variable will always move in the same direction. Today's increases in years left to live are on a collision course with the corporate age bigotry which has lately been enabled by the Supreme Court. A society which considers workers useless after age 45 is wedded to a principle which is likely to cause mean age at death to plummet. Pop goes the sine wave!

Perhaps that's what the wingnuts in Congress want, as long as it doesn't include them.

Dumb phone, etc.

The week has been full of signs of age.

1) I signed up for Medicare Part A. Not that I wanted to. However, now that I'm imminently 65, it seems that my wife's employer (she's the one with the health plan) wants both of us off the hospitalisation rolls. There will be a Round Two to this, after we meet the spectacularly bored individual at the local office who deigned to answer my few questions.

2) I've long accepted that I have a dumb phone. We're in a family plan created by the offspring, so upgrades are in her hands. Someday it may happen. However, the lowest blow was this week's discovery that I have a dumb watch. Granted that I date myself by having a watch that I actually use to tell time, but the goddam thing didn't recognise Leap Day.

Never mind. When there are no clouds, there's a moon to admire. Americans are not very good at admiring the moon, which is worth a pause at every opportunity. Howling is optional.

Three weeks hence I get to sign up for a senior's Charlie Card. That'll wash out the fare increase, but if they cut my buses, I can't ride it downtown.

The French and the barbarians

The world news (that is, the world outside the American media circus) is agog over the proposal to raise the retirement age in France from 60 to 62—over the next eight years.

Let's pause and contrast this with the United States. Here, the official retirement age (that is, the age at which once can claim full retirement benefits) has risen to 66 for those people not already above 65. This happened some years ago, and the change seems to have got past nearly everyone under age 55. Most of them still think it's 65.

The next step was supposed to be raising the retirement age to 67 and performing the minor tweaks that would fix the Social Security deficit that would otherwise become a concern around, oh, my 95th birthday, if I'm unlucky enough to have one. The Republicans and the teabags, having fallen intro the trap of believing their own rhetoric, are instead saying, "oh hell, why don't we just shut down Social Security now, totally, and Medicare while we're at it. And screw the unemployed into the bargain." It's troubling to observe that our supposedly socialist administration seems to think all this is a good idea.

Oh, and if you're of a mind to grunt and say "fine, let them work," remember that they (we) can't. That is, many of us can't. Because while all of this is going down, the de facto retirement age* in the US has slipped under 50. So, as of this writing, when you lose your job at 45 or 50 you won't get either the unemployment benefits or Social Security that you worked for, or Medicare, or another job. Best bet is to hang onto whatever cardboard, blankets and and camping gear you may have, and steal a shopping cart to tote it in. If you then learn the fine art of dumpster diving and travel in packs, you may be able to last a few months after you blow through whatever money you had left after Wall Street pissed away the rest.

Although France may raise the retirement age by two years over the next eight, they still plan to see that their older citizens have some means of support. This is considerably more compassionate than the emerging American "plan," which seems to be no plan at all.

Mary Renault wrote that in Doric Greece, residents who, through bad planning or bad luck, lived to the age of 60 were expected to go up in the hills and do away with themselves. We used to consider this barbarism. Now we call it deficit reduction.

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*The de facto retirement age comes when employers have at least ten excuses for not hiring you for every year of experience you can offer.