I must be getting old, to be thinking about the Social Security problem as much as you guys.
It occurs to me, though, that all the wonkish debate about SS is indicative of a larger societal issue- family, and how we think of it.
How much of this problem wouldn’t be if the extended family was stronger?
Interessting Hogan, Veeery interessting!
My opinion–Baby boomers and others who parents are approaching retirement or impending death age are worried about SS–not for their own retirement’s sake necessarily, but for the sake of their inheritance.
Here’s my example–My parents are millionaires. They own a home free and clear that is probably worth $300K. They have stocks and investments worth about $3-400K. They have life insurance of probably $4-500K. Other assets (antiques, guns, cars, etc.) worth $2-300K. They have no outstanding debts. They have retirement and SS enough to pay all their living expenses. I have 3 siblings–therefore, I stand to inherit at least $250K when my folks pass on. If SS, Medicare, and the new drug benefit were to go away, they would (or might) have to start dipping into their savings. Ergo, my inheritance goes down. If they live long enough and get sick enough, they may use up all their assets, and then I get no inheritance. Then, I may even have to start paying for their care–in other words, a “negative” inheritance.
How much of all this SS and “pull the plug/don’t pull the plug” debate has to do with money? I say the vast majority of it.
I love it. A discussion about Social Security and societal views about family isn’t big enough for you, so you toss baby boomers, millionaires, inheritance, Medicare, the new drug benefit, and right to life/right to die issues into the mix.
Thanks, Brian!
Well, to put it in a nutshell–Before the advent of SS and the Great Society, we fully expected to provide for the needs of our parents in their declining years. Now, we look to the government to do that and look to our parents to leave us a big inheritance. Is this what a “Great Society” does? How about a “Greed Society.”
Well, to put it in a nutshell–Before the advent of SS and the Great Society, we fully expected to provide for the needs of our parents in their declining years. Now, we look to the government to do that and look to our parents to leave us a big inheritance. Is this what a “Great Society” does? How about a “Greed Society.”
I was listening to a report (yes, vitus, on NPR) a few weeks back that gave some reality to your view of what was prior to the Great Society. For many people, it was not pretty. The indigent elderly who had no family support were often housed with the mentally ill and other groups that made live “nasty, brutish, and short” as the report said.
My mother, who taught high school chemistry for 25 years, had less than $100K when she turned 80 and required nursing home care. That nursing home costs more per month than I take home. Could I care for her? Not a chance. She’d be dead by now, and I’d be broke.
the problem with that theory, as i see it, was that social security was created to address an existing problem of seniors being poor and unable to care for themselves financially. don’t know that there is a correlation between ss and weaker extended family. unless such weakening(which is by no means a given) was already occuring.
i know my dad pre-dates social security and at no point would he have ever dreamed that his kids would be caring for him in his old age.
There has to be a healthy dose of “rose colored glasses” to any view that the elderly were well cared for before SS.
First and foremost, in the long lost days before SS life for 99% of Americans was incredibly difficult and hard. The life of a farmer or factory worker did not lend itself at all to even a dream of “retirement”. My understanding is you toiled at whatever job you were lucky enough to have until you could no longer be productive, then were basically a useless part of our economic society. Maybe a lot of people viewed having their “elderly” parents as live-ins, but I’m guessing in general it was viewed mainly as another mouth or two to feed.
But all the above is generalizations and guesses, not factual.
**The indigent elderly who had no family support were often housed with the mentally ill and other groups that made live “nasty, brutish, and short” as the report said. **
That’s a fair point. Just for clarification, I’m not saying that Social Security should be ended, and that people without any family should be left on their own. But how many people don’t have family support?
My mother, who taught high school chemistry for 25 years, had less than $100K when she turned 80 and required nursing home care. That nursing home costs more per month than I take home.
And did Social Security cover her costs? I don’t think so. Let’s try to stay on target here, OK?
social security was created to address an existing problem of seniors being poor and unable to care for themselves financially.
Yes, but why should most of them have to care for themselves? They have family, right?
don’t know that there is a correlation between ss and weaker extended family.
I think there’s absolutely a correlation between the way we view Social Security as being in crisis, and weak extended families. This isn’t to say that one caused the other- my guess would probably be that our notion of the extended family has always been pretty weak, which is why SS appealed to us in the first place.
Let me put it this way: If there were stronger familial ties in our culture, and it was the norm rather than the exception for families to take care of their own elderly, don’t you think the SS crisis would be significantly mitigated?
First and foremost, in the long lost days before SS life for 99% of Americans was incredibly difficult and hard.
Really not trying to be rude, but that’s ridiculous. Life before FDR wasn’t a living hell. This myth that life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” before the government stepped in in 1940-something is unbelievably short-sighted.
no, i don’t think it’s true that stronger extended families would mean a diminished “crisis”. i don’t think there are very many families out there that could provide for their own kids and take on responsibility for elderly care. there’d still be a significant need for ss and there would still be significant strains on ss resources even if family members shared some of the burden.
i don’t think there are very many families out there that could provide for their own kids and take on responsibility for elderly care.
“Elderly care”? I’m not talking about running a nursing home, I’m talking about taking in one’s parents. (And unless SS benefits are a lot bigger than I think they are, they aren’t sufficient to cover elderly care in a nursing home or equivalent care anyway. So that seems like a specious argument to me.)
I think most families out there could do that. This is only my own, personal, anecdotal experience, but my family does it all the time. None of us are rich, believe me.
It occurs to me, though, that all the wonkish debate about SS is indicative of a larger societal issue- family, and how we think of it.
How much of this problem wouldn’t be if the extended family was stronger?
That’s great, Vitus. That’s like saying, “You know, we wouldn’t need to bother with all of this wonkish debate about drilling in the ANWAR, diplomacy in the middle east, the Kyoto accord and global warming, clean air regulations, etc. if people just wouldn’t use any energy or we could come up with a clean, free limitless energy source.”
Well, of course it’s not. Strong extended families are possible- they’ve even existed at times, even in the dark, evil days before the mid-twentieth century.
We might have to agree to disagree, but I didn’t say that SS made life perfect.
What I said is that the life of a farmer or industrial worker was hard, offered no benefits for retirement, and once you were not physically able to perform you were thrown out. This I take as fact from many people in my family who are still farmers, and the traditions of what it was like to be a farmer even 200 years ago are well known in my family. I also take it as fact from the many books that document the lifestyle for all periods in the US prior to today.
No where did I saw SS was, is, nor will be a panacea, but it is definitely better than nothing.
The transition from the iIndustrial Revolution brought about a different focus on lifestyles and what we did for our jobs. Oddly enough, when SS was enacted it didn’t foresee the incredible boom in the economy in the 50’s and how the middle class really solidified and became the moder “American dream”. During the 50’s we should have adjusted SS, but it wasn’t needed so we didn’t.
Isn’t the real problem of SS that we are not demanding that Congress stop spending the surplus?
If the surplus wasn’t being spent, then we wouldn’t have talk of “IOU’s” etc. We’d have a really large account of the SS section of the Federal Government just sitting there, waiting to have people retire and pay them.
The real problem is that Congress is borrowing the money from SS to pay for all the other things that they promise us, and we let them! We don’t even have the balls to tell them to stop taking the SS surplus funds.
Maybe I’m missing it, but that finally hit me today. Am I daft or did I finally have a good thought?
You’re right. It’s not a good analogy. A better analogy would be advocating abstinence as a solution to AIDS. Possible, but not bloody likely. I was hoping to keep this thread away from a discussion about the Church, though.
Additionally, while there is no doubt some truth to your assertion that extended families used to be stronger, it is also probably true that a lot of nuclear families stayed together mostly as a result of societal pressure, while behind closed doors things were less than jake, like spousal and child abuse. Sometimes things look better on the outside than they are on the inside.
What I said is that the life of a farmer or industrial worker was hard, offered no benefits for retirement, and once you were not physically able to perform you were thrown out.
Yes, I agree that the life of a farmer or industrial worker was hard work. Probably it offered no benefits for retirement. But thrown out? In the case of industrial workers, or maybe farmers who didn’t own their farms, maybe they were thrown out of work. But the way you put it, it sounds like they were thrown out on the mean streets to fend for themselves in the cold, cruel world. Veritable armies of dryed up, tired out, broken down old people wandered the streets, rooting for trash to eat, dying a slow, lonely death. When you couldn’t produce anymore, you were basically exiled, banished from society, and forgotten about.
Is that what you think it was like before Social Security?
**I was hoping to keep this thread away from a discussion about the Church, though. **
You and me both. Thanks.
As for the idea that strengthening extended families is impossible, though, it strikes me as not only a severely depressing assertion, but a wrong one. For crying out loud, it’s been the standard practice throughout much of human history. It can hardly be held to be some impossible and unrealistic ideal of human behavior when it’s been so widely and successfully practiced. I might even go as far as to say that if SS does actually disintegrate, inter-generational family bonds will be strengthened as a matter of necessity.
(And why is it that so many people seem so adamant in opposing the simple, human solution in favor of the complicated, mechanical, governmental solution? Really- what’s more simple and more natural than ensuring the care of elderly to the people who know, love, and value them on a personal basis? No, no! That’s wildly unrealistic. Naive! What we need to do is create and sustain a complicated and vastly expensive government bureaucracy! Much better!)
Sometimes things look better on the outside than they are on the inside.
Oh, good grief.
Not totally, but from an employers’ perspective it was vaguely similar. Employees were literally “resources” (not in the Project Management sense the term has these days). They were cogs, no more value than a steam engine. If they got hurt (aka “stopped working”) then they were out, done, no mas.
There weren’t hordes of people just wandering the streets like unemployed zombies, but that’s partially because the population was more spread out. Cities weren’t as big then, there was room to move out in the country. And I think the majority of people lived in non-metropolitan areas (very confident of this).
Obviously as time progressed as a society we became more human. And when I describe these situations I don’t necessarily just mean the year before SS. However, if you look at the depression your description fits. Hordes of unemployed masses, no jobs, no food, starvation, mass soup kitchens, etc. That was atypical though obviously.
But I feel fairly confident saying the majority of people had nothing to fall back on, they took whatever income they had, and there was no retirement for greater than 90% of people, at least not as we view retirement today. If you were lucky to have children to support you (one of the big plusses of a large family, along with free labor) then you were another person looking for a piece of a small pie, less valuable than a child who could work and earn money.
It wasn’t hell on earth, but it wasn’t a retirement community outside of St. Petersburg, FL either.