Young people can have jobs and old people can pursue, not the rocking chair, but fulfilling second ...third ...fourth ....careers ...
IF we push back.
According to the June 7, 2010 Nation:
"Social Security has accumulated a massive surplus--2.5 trillion now, rising to $4.3 trillion by 2023. This vast wealth was collected over many years from workers under the Federal INsurance Contributions Act (FICA) to pay in advance for baby boom retirements. The money will cover all benefits until the 2040s--unless Congress double-crosses workers by changing the rules. This nest egg does not belong to the government; it belongs to the people who paid for it. FICA is not a tax but an involuntary savings."
Our God is a God of abundance.
7 comments:
If the Baby Boom is not fairly treated, there will be a price to pay by my generation. How will my small generation care for our parents' large generation? With astronomical student loan debt, overwhelming medical costs, increasing fuel, housing, and food costs, we are ill-prepared for the time that is coming when we will also need to provide care for our parents. But I believe we are morally obligated to ensure that as the dynamic and even radical Baby Boom mature into elders, they not become a "problem" to be warehoused. I am counting on Baby Boomers to continue to push the boundaries and to redefine the limits of aging just as they have redefined race, gender, and sexuality. They cannot do that if they are they are denied the security they were promised and for which they worked.
Hi Hystery,
I am a later baby boomer, so obviously am looking at this through a different set of lenses. Clearly U.S. society has changed and in a way that adds multiple burdens that didn't use to exist--when I was college-aged, one could get through a good state u. or even a private college without massive--or often any-- debt. People slightly older than me often could go through for free tuition, if they qualified. Medical costs were affordable. There was a social consensus that these things should be affordable. Now, we struggle to put our children through college--essentially draining savings--and they still have to take on a debt burden to pay a share of the cost. We pay dearly to educate them, not so that they will take care of us, but because it is the right thing to do. Certainly it would be nice not to have to turn to them for support when we are old. It's a tough problem that goes deeper than just retirement per se, as you point out.
Increasing immigration to make up for the children the boomers didn't have would be one solution--but that presupposes jobs!! If we can't employ who we have born, how can we say the problem with supporting the older generation is that we didn't have enough children? If we'd had more children, we'd have to expect higher unemployment--or at least, comparable unemployment. I certainly don't know what the answer is, because any hope that we'd engage in shared sacrifice is labelled socialism. There doesn't seem to be much trust in God's abundance. But then, we trust, we have to trust.
I think there are ways to make life more affordable--eg, cutting some of the frills that now go with college--when I was in college it was relatively cheap compared to income but even at a private college, the amenities were rather austere by today's standards, which undoubtedly kept costs down. It was more like camp-plus, rather than the grand hotel, and that was part of the fun. Certainly, retirees could live in small houses or apartments once the children were gone--and that could be a relief. But I often feel like sister from another planet and know that what seems reasonable or preferable to me is anathema or torture to many people.
One wonders how much we would be able to afford if we didn't pour so much of our abundance into preparing for war, making war, and cleaning up after war. We also have an economy too much based on products they tell us we need rather than on products and services that would actually help us grow healthier, wiser, and more whole. What kind of society sells people tons of junk food and plastic trinkets while human beings starve to death?
Jeremy points out:
Hystery is right. The Social Security trust fund is already
practically empty, because the
U.S.Treasury borrows it dry to
pay for war, and bailing out the biggest banks, etc. There's simply no pot of funds sitting
around for early retirement.
My wife and I are both on early
retirement because of disability.
It has been hard, but not incredibly hard. Ever since
Judy and I married in 1970, we lived on a low income, so we have practice. And we have only one child.
There is a lot of practical good
advice on living simply that should be included in Quaker books of discipine (which do normally,
and correctly, tell you to write
a will.) Remember that immigrants'
children, like our own, will be
great contributors to the economy. No one is just a mouth.
Jeremy Mott
Diane, Worldwide, Quakerism, mainly
but by no means entirely evamngelical Quakerism, is growing
explosively. There are so many
websites and blogs available that no one could count them...Here are a few: The (Briitish) website for
Quaker Congo Partnership; the websites Friends Women's Assn. and
Burundi Y.M. and blogs of Quaker doctors Alexia Niboya and Alexandra Douglas, who work in
Burundi for the FWA; also the blog of British
Friend Elizabeth Cave, who often works in Rwanda and Burundi (among Friends in both countries); also "All Quiet on the "Quaker
Front" by U.S.Friend Andrew Peter-
son, who is now working with Burundian Friends to ensure honest
and nonviolent elections there.
Try the reports of Friends Peace Teams in St.Louis. David Zarembka sometimes does not keep his reports from African Great Lakes
Initiative up-do-date, but Naomi Hoover from Indonesia and Val Liveoak from Central America tend to be more up-to-date. AGLI works
almost entirely with African Quakers; FPT--LatinAmerica with
Friends and Catholics; FPT--Indonesia with Muslims in Sumatra
who are recovering from a long
civil war. All of FPT uses AVP
very heavily; AVP was a Quaker
invention (And one of the inventors was Steve Angell, sr.)
I'll go on. Jeremy Mott
Jeremy reports on Bolivia:
Bolivian Friends are the third largest national group of Friends
in the world. They are all Aymara
Indians (with a few Quechuas too.)
They are all evangelical or holiness Friends, stemming from missionary efforts of Oregon (now Northwest) and Central (of Indiana) Yearly Meetings in the 1920's and later. Education in
the Aymara language used to be
illegal, so Quaker shcools had to
be clandestine until about 1950.
Now there are public schools in
Bolivia, so most of the Friends
schools are gone. Yet almost
none of the young Friends can afford to go to college, even though in Bolivia the entire cost
is about $500 a year (excluding
rent, for one lives at home).
Central Y.M. is too small to help
much anymore, and Northwest is engaged in helping Friends in Rwanda (a big task, involving Friends from many places).
So Newton Garver of New York Yearly Meeting had an idea: the Bolivian Quaker Education Fund.
First it gives college scholarships to young Bolivian
Friends; several scores have
graduated in the last several
years; after 5 or 6 years one is
a qualified doctor, lawyer, dentist, accountant, agronomist;
after 4 years a teacher. Second,
BQEF has installed computers in
the remaining Bolivian Quaker schools and is (for money) teaching public-school teachers how to use computers. Third, BQEF
has arranged teacher exchanges
between Bolivian and U.S. Quaker
schools. Fourth, BQEF has arranged
for U.S. Quaker volunteers to work
in Bolivian Friends schools. And
last but by no means least, BQEF
has introduced AVP to Bolivia, and
now AVP is off and running on its own. The three largest Bolivian
yearly meetings (of six) are all
involved; and British, Irish, N.Y.Y.M., Phila.Y.M., New England Y.M., and some of the unprogrammed meetings in North Carolina are
involved; Haverford, Westtown,
Oakwood, and Carolina Friends
Schools. Take a look at the website
www.bqef.org. I think it's an
exciting Quaker program. It's
really changed things for Friends in Bolivia and in the U.S.A.
Jeremy
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