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Breaking Critical Promises Made to Working Women
My advancing age makes me think more about what kind of retirement lies ahead for me. I am more afraid now than I ever have been about the clock ticking ever faster toward the day when I will not have the resources to retire well and will have to keep working for someone else longer than I may want to or am able to physically.
And in the current political environment, with growing amounts of vitriol aimed at anything termed an "entitlement" program like Social Security or Medicare, many of us who believed there would be a social insurance safety net in place for us as the bumps and bruises of life kept us from being independently wealthy leading into our later years are scared and rightly so. There are targets on our backs as if we have somehow been slackers who see ourselves as "entitled" to something we did not earn.
That offends me. That sort of thinking terrifies me. I have worked very hard for more than four-and-a-half decades. No slacking. I have been willing to do whatever it took to keep my family afloat financially. And no matter what, I have worked.
Like many women in my generation, I began working outside my home as a young teenager, and I began contributing to Social Security and sometimes when I could do so to other retirement plans. But also like many women who work outside the home, I often worked jobs that did not afford me enrollment in retirement plans or have any employer contribution to speak of to those plans.
Additionally, as we have all seen in recently released studies, women still earn about 70 percent of what men do for the same work in the United States. That drastically and negatively impacts our ability to have the same benefits accumulated when we reach retirement age. Add a few negative life events - a divorce, an illness, and unexpected trauma here and there - and women face sometime total reliance on those social insurance benefits - Social Security and Medicare - to which we have contributed throughout our lives rather than have those benefits simply be a supplement to some private retirement funds.
So when Social Security and Medicare are targeted, I am targeted.
President Obama's debt commission has begun its "bipartisan" work. Where have we heard this before? How did women and working folks fare in their other bipartisan efforts? In the latest New York Times report, "Mr. Obama met privately with the commission members at the White House before their meeting at an executive office building across the street. In the Rose Garden afterward, he told reporters that he had insisted that everything be on the negotiating table."
I sure had everything on the table as I worked for my family. I left it all on the field, friends. And there's not much left for me now. I will keep working as hard as I can for as long as I can - and I hope as smart as I can - but I am angry that the rules of engagement are about to change for me again. I am tired of trying to reinvent myself financially - time is running out.
Like many other women, my husband is older than I. In recent years due to the collapse of his primary profession of machining and the collapse of his health, I have also become the primary breadwinner in our family. It is my employment that provides us our benefits; it is my employment that pays the lion's share of the family obligations. And within the corrupt and crumbling healthcare system, it has been my income and my employment that has had to protect my husband's failing health. I have no retirement funds left - every penny of what we have ever had has gone to keep my husband alive. I have worked hard to make sure of that.
So when the President's commission looking at entitlements decides to chop Social Security either by cuts to actual benefit payments or by raising the retirement age or both, I get very angry and very defensive. And when those on the panel want to puff themselves up by cutting Medicare benefits, I shudder. The entitlement cutting these Presidential appointees are lining up to endorse as if they are proving they are good stewards of my money are proving just the opposite. The cuts are a slap in the face and much worse for millions and millions of women in this nation and the cuts will harm us for generations to come.
Cutting benefits that will disproportionately injure women in their retirement years is wrong on many levels. Cutting benefits upon which a lifetime of working to protect others seemed worthwhile because of a safety net for me in the end is breaking a contract upon which I significantly relied. I suspect if I relied on the promise of Social Security and Medicare to protect me from poverty and a quicker death in my later years then so too have millions of other women (and men) as we watched the contributions from our paychecks and trusted we were at least protected in that way.
Saying "shame on you" does not work when said to those in the well-heeled classes of rulers in this nation who seem intent on selling some sort of fiscal conservatism and corporatism as a way to honey-up to the radical right or show themselves as governing from the middle. There is no middle ground in breaking a contract millions of people took seriously for decades as a hedge against suffering when we got old.
A broken promise, a broken contract, is just that. We've already seen the horrible unfolding of the corporate agenda in writing the health insurance reform bill upon which this nation's health system will surely collapse in future years as costs continue to rise and citizens continue to go broke and die while insured and denied appropriate care. Any system designed to be better for the few who have greater resources necessarily harms women more. And we are certainly being slapped now, aren't we?
I once asked a good friend and wise woman I knew, "What do you think that feeling of impending doom is?"
She answered, "Impending doom." Clear and simple. I have that feeling now.
Cutting my Social Security and cutting my Medicare is cutting short the years I may have left on this earth to enjoy life. And there are millions like me. There is no way to restore years of life lost once you do that to us. And I, for one, have no intention of letting that happen quietly. I worked too hard and cared too much for those around me to have "entitlement cutters" with no moral compass or sense of social justice at all determine the quality of my life should be any less than anyone else's.
Everybody in, nobody out. Women in this nation deserve the "entitlements" we have worked for and relied upon. And if you do not protect those benefits for women, you should stand accountable to the women injured.
- Posted in
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71 Comments so far
Show AllIt is a huge mistake to look at Medicare and Social Security as entitlements and I am afraid that even Donna is making that mistake. Neither Social Security nor Medicare were meant to be "entitlement" programs and both originally had little to do with money and everything to do with making the US unique in caring for the elderly especially when they are in dire conditions. The irony is that for all the dedicated efforts to provide benefits for seniors 65 and over in the USA, respect and care for the elderly has actually declined over the years while in most other nations, it actually went up. Even in India, China, Japan, etc... the elderly actually get far better care than in the USA and in those countries, there is some form of universal health care for everyone which includes the elderly. When Donna said "Cutting my Social Security and cutting my Medicare", she reminded me of that heckler in a townhall meeting who shouted something like "Government hands off my Medicare". Therefore, I conclude that all "entitlement" programs must be demolished first and foremost in order to build a true system that cares for all rather than discriminates on age, gender, race, etc...
You know, Max, naming it "entitlement" already assigned it the character of being an undeserved expectation. That was a deliberate verbal strategy, otherwise known as "framing", which apparently worked for you. Do not let yourself be fooled by such framing. Donna Smith is not alone is her situation - there are also Don Smiths and LeDon Smiths, but pensioners do tend to be over 60. So your final statement is a bit woo-woo.
Are you young? I am not; I am one of the lucky ones - I spent a lifetime working at a respectable job - and here's the tricky part, Max, don't miss this now - I paid thousands of dollars every year for 35 years into various pension funds and security plans, money I did not have access to, but someone else held in trust as it accrued interest, so that I could have a little of it later on. I relied - had to - on these people to invest my money -MY money, Max - safely so that everyone could benefit. As I was still young and working, my money paid for the pensions and securities of older retirees or disableds. Now I'm old, my money has gained enough value that I can live off some of it, benefit from some of it, as the next lot of workers adds to the pile. (The problem with social security and medicare is that the next generation of workers will be earning much less and therefore paying less into it, so that by 2050, there may very well be a problem. The problem is NOT that current retirees are taking too much - they're taking what was added over the last 40 years - their own money.) The solution is NOT to rip up the security and medicare, as whatever is going to "replace" it will be an exploitative crap shoot like the health insurance y'all enjoy so much.
That's how a society works, Max. I still pay taxes so that my money can help pay for the needs of others, just as they do for mine. One hand washes the other, Max.
This is not an "entitlement" it is a contract, a social contract. It is wrong to change the terms unilaterally and undemocratically.
Language - framing - creative re-jargoning - (eg. "normalizing" mental patients - remember what that meant? It meant dumping them out of chronic care facilities and into the street - have you ever seen so many street people? Is that the moral way to treat the most vulnerable?)
You are listening to that segment of society that really feels "entitled" - entitled to your last few pennies so they can live in blissful excess. We should rebel against their sense of "entitlements", not fall for their line of bull-puckey as they loot the People's life-savings. An entitlement is something for nothing, something you get because of your ancestry - like a hereditary title - Duke This, Sir That, and the holdings that go with it. Think - who really "inherits" entitlements nowadays? the laid-off auto worker? the laid-off teacher? the cube monkey who has to accept the third pay drop in 5 years so he can keep his job?
That's the morality of the entitled aristocrats in Congress and Wall Street, Tweedly-dee and Tweedly-dum, the head and hiney of the same monster.
Your conclusion is terribly wrong, terribly misinformed, and terribly immoral. Please stop being a sucker for Wall Street.
Good comment, redballoon.
Joe
redballoon, thanks for the thoughtful explanation. Don't get me wrong. I am not for abolishing Social Security and Medicare. Instead, I want to see Medicare expanded to Medicare for all and for the true meaning of Social Security beyond money alone be emphasized. I am not being a sucker for Wall Street by trying to ask that we look concepts beyond money. I am in my 40s but I think that if we must defeat Wall Street, we must look beyond the money part of everything.
Thanks for clearing that up, Max. And you're right - one concept beyond money might be the question of what exactly does the relationship between citizen and government consist of - and how does it get expressed? Yes, the all-holy bottom line isn't everything, isn't enough.
redballoon: Excellent comment!
Social security, Medicare, old age pensions - are not "entitlements" they are savings plans. No one gets them for nothing.
Otherwise, you are right.
The biggest losers when Obama cuts social security and medicare will not be the elderly, it will be young Americans who remain jobless for most of their lives because of tens of millions of middle age and elderly Americans who delay or cancel retirement from their family wage jobs due to Obama's cuts and Obamacare.
I thought Reagan already set up the slippery slope of gutting Medicare and Social Security to be saved for the elderly but made unavailable to the younger. The only way I see out is to look beyond the money of these great programs just like the Europeans and the Far Easterners. The irony in Europe is that even with larger percentages of young people being unemployed, the young there are able to fall back on a few good safety nets and then prepare to adjust. Here in this country, we have to fall through a chasm and yet adjust accordingly. Is it any wonder that this nation is a lost soul?
Ditto for water, fresh air, and the freedom to die working, everything is taxed these days, it's not an entitlement WE PAY FOR IT!. Long since the money in the SSI accounts has been replaced by IOUs. The only thing I can think of is to pound on the Bush Ranch's door and demand repayment of the moneys he stole then go down the line to Clinton, The Reagan Family, Jimmy Carter, and thru the Congressional record, trying to get the browers to pay up!
I rember on learing about all the browing and thought "Well if theres no Money for SSI I want my contributions back as cash so I can put it in an honest Chinese Bank and have some of MY MONEY for retirment!
Donna's story is an American tragedy, and one in which all of us will be starring who are not independently wealthy. We are just supposed to shut up already and die quietly once we've outlived our usefulness as workhorses for capitalism. We are the budget cuts we've been looking for! It is a kind of soylent green approach to managing a nation's economy.
I share your feelings of insecurity (Donna) because of how the healthcare reform legislation was exploited by the insurance corporations and facilitated by the politicians. If that was the template, I expect those in power to reduce our Social Security benefits and to increase our benefit eligibility age thresholds. Why? So that the rich people do not have to pay taxes appropriate to the fact that the top 20 percent of our wealthy own 80 percent of our wealth. The rich use the word entitlement to describe Social Security when it is fully paid for by our own wages. The reason they do this is to discredit our ownership of our Social Security. We paid for this from when we began working until we retire. It belongs to us, not to the scheming rich people. The rich people are technically right: They do need to get THEIR unrealistic sense of entitlement under control!
Too right Donna.
Now that AARP has become an insurance corporation, seniors no longer have a powerful lobby to act as a third rail. We no longer count and it's a lot easier than doing the right thing.
Economically it's stupid and morally it's unjust.
Not only have older working Americans been hit hard by the broken health care system but many seniors have been wiped out by the financial shenanigans of Wall Street.
Obama should be raising Social Security benefits to restore this sector of the economy and to make these people whole.
They were the victims of their own government in its failure to protect them.
Write the White House here and tell them what you think of their self serving "bi-partisanship".
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
"Bi-partisanship" is a crock...the two-party scenario is illusory. there's only one party -
wall street.
Sioux Rose
CADAWA: You beat me to the punch!
When I was raising my children, I often qualified for an "Earned income tax credit." It was usually about $1000 and I graciously accepted it, because being a single Mom, I usually had about $8000 in debt, and the interest on the credit cards was an abomination that no sane nation should have ever tolerated. I felt the $1000 was a trade-off against THAT heist.
The way the banks just took OUR money and left us with nothing is a continuation of this same style of Scroog-enomics. I had a CD for several thousand and couldn't believe when it came up for renewal that when I started it at 4.65% it's now earning 1%. Meanwhile, I owe less than $2000 on a major credit card and the interest this month was $46.
So $46 a month on $2000 is considered FAIR business practice, while the banks now pay about $100 on $5000 for the entire year. This is INSANE. It's unconscionable.
I have been a freelance writer that barely scraped by MANY years. My social security payments will be minimal, and if the "law" holds forcing us to purchase the extortion payment to big insurance (as if that qualifies as "health care"), then I figure my social security will be used for THAT. I consider it a deal with the devil.
Home values have been drastically reduced while the banks got the public's money to collect TONS of vacant properties to sell at a better time. Savings earn zilch. Health care costs rise, as do other living costs... and we're told WE are slackers?
The real welfare recipients are the big corporations that get juicy deals thanks to the whores cum congress persons they bribe/hire, and the greatest absconder of all, the MIC... if the 4th estate was doing its job, the public would know the TRUE numbers and instead of blaming the people at the lower end of the fiscal spectrum for the paltry dues the "system" is obliged to pay them (back)... the citizenry would get the TRUTH about what Wall St/the banks/the MIC/big pharma/big insurance/big oil are STEALING from the pot... covering their tracks with doublespeak politicians and their legal enablers.
Except for the church of the Middle Ages closing its gilded-in-gold doors to the very poor, I cannot think of a time less humane than our own.
How does your little earned income tax credit (from doing honest work while raising children) compare with tax breaks, subsidies and bailouts for Wall Street for gambling and grifting?
Joe
from the article:
'Cutting my Social Security and cutting my Medicare is cutting short the years I may have left on this earth to enjoy life.'
the lifestyle represented by social security and medicaid is responsible for destroying our world...
if you are genuinely concerned about your shortening lifespan, social security and medicare are not the place to start...
private property, industrial devastation and chemical saturation are...
Social Security and Medicare are the direct result of the shortening of other people's lives, elsewhere...
they are but pieces of an entire system that must fall, that all life still able may go on here...
How do you run your computer in your little mud hut? Do you pay for health care with chickens?
We pay for social security our whole lives with reductions in our wages. Same with Medicare. Those are not the things that shorten people's lives, here or elsewhere. It is militarization, industrial devastation, ruin of the environment, exploitation, and lack of political liberty.
Joe
I think dubet meant that Social Security and Medicare are misused to keep seniors somewhat satisfied and pay no attention to the war machine. You are right that Social Security and Medicare don't shorten our lives but when it comes to looking out for each other and caring, this nation is too lost a soul to do so.
I understand the frustration that comes from seeing what our country is doing in Iraq etc, and then seeing thousands of US residents out shopping, standing on line for days to get some iThing, ignoring our murder and maiming of civilians. It is very difficult to get lots of people to do anything about the invasions, even if they say they want peace. I am happy if I get ONE new person at a time to take an action of any kind against our militarism and creeping fascism.
Perhaps you see upper and middle class people who have other resources to supplement Medicare and Social Security. But for many, that is all they have after a lifetime of low wage jobs that did not allow for savings. Medicare and Social Security are minimal evidences of caring and looking out for each other. I do agree that many seniors of the AARP ilk have been selfish in looking out only for themselves over the last decades. Many times I have heard statements to the effect "We fought for this; let the young people fight for themselves." They set a bad example of struggle being narcissistic. And all generations have been distracted and bought off by needless consumerism. We have become a very corrupt nation, as you say, but taking care of old people is evidence of some small remnant of decency. Before Social Security, old people no longer able to work were at the mercy of their children, if they had any. At least now people do not have to have multiple children in hopes that one of them will take them in after their working life is over.
Your theory seems to be that living in misery necessarily makes one look out for others. Sometimes it just makes people too tired and strapped to do anything but scrape out a living for themselves, even if they are sympathetic. I honestly do not know how to break the passivity. I think it lies in improving our methods and channels for struggle until we get it right. But I do not think that being arrogant toward ordinary people and their "little problems" is particularly helpful, especially to those who need us to organize against our military's brutal assualts and our equally deadly economic assaults.
Joe
"Your theory seems to be that living in misery necessarily makes one look out for others."
I do apologize if I sounded like I was putting it that way but I have no belief or intention of forcing people into misery just to make them look out for others. I have to admit that I am jealous of other nations being more caring in nature and less miserable despite lack of Social Security and Medicare for 65 and over. But I guess it makes some sense given the inconsistent ways benefits are handled in this nation vs true socialism of benefitting the greatest number of people in other nations. Maybe I am looking at this wrong but I keep seeing a pattern of great programs being divided for and against segments while in most other countries, these same great programs would be applied towards helping everyone equally. Social Security started off on a good foundation but Medicare did not. JFK and LBJ should have made Medicare for all when they had the chance but they didn't and now, most young people know nothing about Medicare in the US let alone universal health care in other nations. Of the young who are aware of Medicare and Social Security, there is a growing negative feeling that it will be gone anyway and as some have pointed out on this site, a lot of youngsters are insanely believing in putting their funding for Social Security in "personal accounts" not caring that Wall Street is professionally prepared to rip them off and do irreversible financial harm. My fear is that if this picks up, then there will need to be a second Social Security just to make up for their investments gone sour for fear that the country will be in too much financial chaos.
Thanks, Joe, for your excellent post!
This issue is about a broken deal between Donna and the government. They have her money and are ripping her off. It's her money. It's not the only thing that worries everyone to death, but it's a relatively narrow one. Donna, who has acted in good faith all ther life, can't wait till the system falls.
Neither can you.
Mon Dieu, pauvre chosette!
Are you genuinely sympathetic or are you being a jerk?
Joe
There's the small matter of one million dead Iraqis, mostly women and children.
Drones targeting Pashtun weddings, and Special Forces killing bound pregnant women.
How does ignoring our internal harshness toward working women help? I believe that they are linked. Poverty and lack of medical care kill. Passive people who accept harshness even toward their own women, children and elderly are not likely to be moved by the murder of similar people in other places.
Joe
Private Health Insurers, profit and non-profit (an accounting device) kill every day.
And many of the executives actually enjoy it.
"Passive people who accept harshness even toward their own women, children and elderly are not likely to be moved by the murder of similar people in other places." -- jclientelle
Excellent comment! I agree.
And as you have been saying all week! Americans can go to Hell! for the sins of our leaders, who never listen to us anyhow??
Hate Much >^^<
There's the small matter of Serbia and Iraq covered in low level radiation from US nuclear warfare involving the explosion of depleted uranium munitions, which radiation is causing cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and increased cervical cancer from radioactive sperm.
The US is a predatory Capitalist warfare state.
The US is Communism for the rich, Capitalism for the poor.
The US is from each according to need, to each according to greed.
Keep working hard all your lives, suckers, and feeling virtuous about it--the Finance Capitalists just couldn't manage without morons like you.
And maybe now and then think of two bound pregnant women murdered by Special Forces that you helped finance and put there with your life long STUPIDITY.
You know, Eugene, pauvre petit misanthrope que tu es, political consciousness is supposed to be founded in empathy, compassion. Grow some.
The world is full of problems - caused by the EU as much as any by other nation. To describe one is not to deny all the others. Pick your issue, declare it, work on it is all one can do - which world injustice are YOU working to correct, Eugene? Or do you just stand on the sidelines and yap, petit chiot effronte'?
"political consciousness is supposed to be founded in empathy, compassion."
According to whom?
Every moral philosophy, code, and belief system since they were written down, 6000 years ago.
Dear Donna,
I share your concerns, but I think it is especially sad that you allow yourself to still be used by the democrats. The "Progressive Democrats" are like someone who enables a domestic abuser.
I hope for your sake that someday you will realize the democrats are abusers who lie with pretty words to keep you in their perverse relationship. They insist on including republican abusiveness in their "bipatisan" sadism while dismissing any real progress.
From what I have read, the cuts in Medicare are mostly aimed at Medicare Advantage plans, which were a scam from the start, and were designed to wreck regular Medicare. They were another handout to the insurance companies, and that is why they are being targeted first for cuts. I believe one can still switch back to regular Medicare, which might be wise.
Also, it looks as if the Social Security cuts may be worse for the better-off, which is probably alright if it is absolutely necessary. However, the lower income people do get a better percentage return for their contributions now, which helps a little. The right wing Republicans will never quit trying to abolish these programs, at the same time they approve of 68 million dollar bonus pay, such as the CEO of Goldman-Sachs got. Of course he EARNED that.
Actually Medicare has always disproportionately benefited the rich.
It is also the high risk pool the private Health Insurers don't want.
That's why it was passed.
Thinking caps, everyone. Know it hurts your head but it is good for your health now and then.
" Medicare has always disproportionately benefited the rich."
Where do you get that idea from? Most poor seniors I met are getting spared of their medical expenses despite Medicare's woes.
Let me ask the author, where IS the money to pay for all this? We're not talking pocket change. We're talking total unfunded liabilities for both SS and medicare being $107 trillion - that's not a typo.
Considering that the US is practically bankrupt, there is no theoretical way of increasing payouts for those two programs without harming our credit ratings further. Basically countries like China and Japan have been financing our gargantuan spending. Spend any more money and expect the Fed's so called AAA rating to plummet to junk status. At that point you can say good buy to your social security and medicare.
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I'm getting you reported.
Whatever you say.
After Gianfranco Sanguinetti, only Communism can save US Capitalism now.
I think you need to spend time in bed with Kim Jong II. Or maybe the Castro brothers.
Social Security's fall began under Nixon. He was the 1st to start looting the monies that had accumulated from the worker deductions.
That was opening the flood gates - now SS covers programs that were once covered by the general funds of the US.
Children of dead military officers are covered under SS until they graduate from college. etc., etc.
SS would NOT be in trouble if not for this looting begun under Nixon. In fact, more money would be available talk of its demise premature.
As one recalls, Blackwater/Xe, by a very complex set of machinations, actually uses SS to cover "life insurance" for some of its mercenaries.
Whenever someone uses "social security" and "my money" together it makes me laugh. SS/Medicare are a forced Ponzi -- there is no lock box! Our contributions get paid out every month to other people. They are depending on our forced, charitable contributions. Future retirees will be dependent on the next generation's forced charity. Don't you get it? Once you hand the money over to the government it isn't your money anymore. Virtually no one even keeps track of how much they have contributed over the years--I just pulled out my SS annual statement and checked for myself--it doesn't even tell you--so I did some math to calculate. Why? Because it isn't your money anymore and Wash, DC wants you to focus on the promised benefits not your payments. See page 2, in bold print--"Your estimated benefits are based on current law. Congress has made changes to the law in the past and can do so at any time...the payroll taxes collected will be enough to only pay 78% of the scheduled benefits.
So sorry, all we have is an IOU from the bankrupt USA. Good luck.
We are all about to be short-changed by reality. This has been obvious since the 1980's. Anyone depending solely on SS for retirement is going to be disappointed. Don't get me wrong--when my benefits are less than promised I won't be happy either. I'll keep working until I can't and then I will have to make do. Complaining about it won't change the financial balance sheet of the USA--stop voting for politicians that make promises, period!
"We are all about to be short-changed by reality."
We?
All?
Good point, Eugene.