Re Social Security--We've forgotten what poverty is.

[TexasLawyer]

A Bush strategy in the battle over Social Security appears to be turning one generation against another. This strategy may be helped along by simple demographics and by time. Each generations has a differing perspective of what Social Security is for. Young adults today may not fully understand that Social Security was enacted to help all Americans avoid abject poverty in our old age.

Today's college aged kids and many baby boomers have grown up during a time of peace and tremendous prosperity. They generally have little interaction with the poorest of our society and have been protected from any real, personal experience with hunger and homelessness. Younger people will be more willing to play fast and loose with Social Security because they don't know what life would really be like if we had a bad economy and Social Security was weakened or completely gone. (both of which situations may be coming).

Check out this great Washington Monthly essay, written a few years ago, on the country's collective amnesia about poverty.


The Ghost of Tom Joad
What happens when an entire generation forgets what it means to be poor?

By Lynda McDonnell

<snip>

Nearly half the country is younger than 35, and the percentage of Americans who can remember Black Friday or the War on Poverty is on the decline. Those coming up behind them view poverty through a very different lens---if they view it at all. Not only have today's young adults come of age during an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity, their social history has largely been informed by such leaders as Ronald Reagan and Jesse Ventura, not Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. And, as America's class segregation has sharpened over the past 20 years, today's newest generation of affluent adults has had very little opportunity to fully appreciate their good fortune.

This shift in perspective is already having an impact on national politics; even the Democrats understand that talk of noble causes like ending hunger or combating illiteracy does little to rally the voters. During the first presidential debate, the only mention of poverty from either candidate came when Al Gore suggested that welfare reform should be extended to the fathers of poor children.

You could say that the disappearance of poverty from national politics is merely the product of a prosperity-induced callousness or the stupor of affluence, but I suspect the reason is more complicated than that. Call it national amnesia.


<snip>

I am worried about the impact of those memories fading from our national consciousness the way the Depression's lard sandwiches already have. The loss of our collective memory of poverty---with the lessons it offers about temperance, thrift, compassion, social obligations, and the randomness of misfortune---has serious implications, not just for the Democrats, whose political roots lie in such history, but for the country as a whole.

Over time, an absence of concern for the poor could erode public support for the great safety nets of old age---Social Security and Medicare. Why should we support old people if they didn't save enough when they were young? In foreign affairs, it could make us dangerously stingy and isolationist. Why give foreign aid to hungry children in Africa? There's always Malthus. Since minorities have higher poverty rates, lack of knowledge or concern about poverty will retard efforts to bridge our continuing racial divides.

A democratic society relies on interdependence and mutual responsibility to work well. Just as poor people have an obligation to work and contribute to society, the prosperous have an obligation to open doors, reward effort, and share their wealth to ensure that people who work hard---at whatever wage level---can live decently and put their children in good schools. But without grandparents to nag about starving children in Africa, developing that sense of social obligation in future generations is going to take some work from all of us.

<snip>

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0011.mcdonnell.html

[newscott]

1. Free bump for the article title alone!

The highway is alive tonight,
Nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes,
I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light,
With the ghost of old Tom Joad.

[atreides1]

2. Hit the Nail Right On The Head

Good shot my friend.

Bush is going to use the lack of experience, and the greed factor to turn the younger workers against their elders.

So now the country becomes even more divided.

[cornermouse]

3. Ask what your grandparents or great grandparents did

to survive the Depression. I already know and that's what I'm going to do.

[TexasLawyer]

4. my grandmother used to

save string and little pieces of foil, even if the foil was dirty from cooking. She would just wash it off, fold it and put it in a drawer. She was horrified if we didn't eat every shred of food on our plates. She believed that her son (my father) was raising his children to be lazy and wasteful.

[cornermouse]

5. Large gardens, canning and drying are going to be back in

style. Recycling EVERYTHING that you get your hands on. Learning to eat things you would never think of eating now.

[stevebreeze]

6. we can, or freeze a lot now...not just econoimcal..tastes great!

Since all the food we put up is grown in out garden it is chemical free.

[cornermouse]

27. Yep. I'm also considering drying fruits and veggies.

[CrispyQ]

13. There's a sci fi book, by David Brin, I believe

that takes place in the future. One of the main characters' family makes their living by going through old landfills. I recall the character thinking how wasteful our society was & not believing the stuff we threw away.

I believe the same book has a Japanese character who lived in a community that was a man-made float of fabric type houses/tents all tied together that floats in the ocean.

I read this book several years ago & at the time both ideas were startlingly new to me, but I thought, Yep, we'll probably be there sooner than I imagine.

And here we are.

[jwirr]

17. I agree with what worked back then but

98% of the citizens back then lived in rural conditions. Today it is reversed. Gardening may not be possbible for most people. My father had a large country garden which produced more than we needed. Every time he went to town he loaded the back seat of the car with veggies and fruit and made stops on the way to homes of the needy. We will need to watch out for each other. We will need to reject bushies every man for himself ideas.

[cornermouse]

26. There is container gardening.

I've also seen articles about roof gardens.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

10. My grandma still

keeps every cool-whip and butter dish. There are stacks of them in the basement. She has the string - and foil drawer too! Open her fridge and you find multiple little containers holding leftovers, they never get thrown out! G & G started out with a 2 room house that they built onto over 20 years, 6 kids, and very little money. I think it affected my Mom pretty hard, to this day she doesn't feel "safe" unless she has her big freezer stocked full of food.

[oneold1-4u]

24. Remember hunger

Extra dollars are invested in good foods for the cupboard and freezer! Hunger is actually a disease for the mind and body. Without water or nourishment for only a few days isn't deadly, but the actions after a week or more do not follow the normal. If there is any way to get it, a person will, at any cost because starving IS NOT NICE, to be or see. Learning to take care of yourself and family is important. If you have emergency provisions now, keep them up, and maybe increase, for up to one or two more weeks. Living without the amenities of running water, sewer,and electricity was the norm for many thousands still living today. They have a book to write! A handbook for Democrats! We are the survivors! We kept the republicans alive too! ???

[annabanana]

7. Thank you for posting this.

We boomers remember stories our parents told us from the depression, stories of real want and deprivation. How hard it is for us to put ourselves in their shoes, and how much harder for our children to understand twice removed.

What a sad awakening awaits us all.

[eridani]

8. We might be getting back to basics sooner than we think

Basic economics = if you can't eat it, drink it, wear it, build a house with it or burn it to keep warm, then to hell with it.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

9. Great article!

I agree completely. We went through some tough times when I was a kid. I hate potatoe soup to this day! Those days when I feel spoiled and I really don't want to go to work, all I have to do is think about that nasty tater soup! Gets my ass up every time.

[Hissyspit]

11. What I told my students around 2000

...was that this was a totally unprecedented period of economic prosperity in human history. This seems like the norm to us, but it is the opposite in a sense. It's not the norm at all, and that they should get a sense of perspective, because it allows you to see things others don't - like the importance of paying attention to the rest of the world; and that big changes in American social structure could be coming. America was complacent in 2000 and I tried to get my students to understand this as the truth and understand why it was true. Did they get it? I don't know.
But in the late '90s I said something big was coming, economic or else, and in 2001, it came. In August of 2001, I told students and my girlfriend that who won "Survivor" was not important, but that terrorists finally slipping a successful attack on U.S. soil past us was important. Maybe some of my students thought of that in September. Who knows? I teach ART HISTORY, by the way, not Political Science. Don't tell me cross-disciplinary studies are not important! (Of course, "Survivor" was significant in its own way...)

[indepat]

12. Bestowing abject poverty on millions of American will be just one of many

legacies of this Administration and its accomplices in the Congress.

[TexasLawyer]

14. and it will happen gradually

just like cooking a frog to death in slowly heating water. If you throw the frog in when the water is already hot, the frog will jump out.

I think a lot of Americans are already realizing that the water is getting unbearable.

[indepat]

15. And the best is yet to come

[drew4president]

16. A social security solution.

Bush is arguing not only for privatization of social security, but greater individualization. He’s selling Social security as a government run retirement plan. Social security was never designed to be a retirement plan, it is a safety net so people wouldn’t have to fear living in poverty in their last years of life. It’s a pay as you go system, income redistribution from the young and working, to the elderly.

I do think that Social Security is facing a crisis, and ignoring it is as dangerous as ignoring other emerging problems, for example global warming. But I think the better solution is to gradually turn social security into a need based plan. Retiring millionaire, should not be subsidized by younger generations.

Social Security can then focus on helping the truly needy, and at the same time reduce the tax burden on the working class. Remember, this is a highly regressive tax.

I know it’s a hard sell to tell someone who has been paying Social Security their entire lives that they are going to loose benefits because they have made the effort to adequately prepare for retirement. However I don’t think we have to many other options.

[TexasLawyer]

18. Raise the cap

The quickest fix would be to raise the cap on wages subject to the dedicated payroll tax. In essence, that is a needs-based fix, since it would only affect taxpayers earning more than $90,000 per year.

There is no good reason why Joe six-pack has to pay 7% of his income to social security, while, say, Michael Eisner pays less than half a percent of his wage income to SS on his $1 million/year salary. (This is not to mention his other income, many millions of $ in capital gains, which are not subject to a SS tax, and which no one is suggesting will ever be subject to that tax.)

[KajaC]

28. The problem with raising the wage base limit is....

...that Socail Security contributions are matched by employers. So, if you raise the wage base limit, businesses will pay more into the system. That would be fine if there was some guarantee that they wouldn't raise prices on their products to recover the difference. But that's not reality. They will, and that will effect the low-income workers who buy the products. There is no simple solution.

[camero]

36. Might I add this?

That raising the cap on SS taxes was part of the agreement that Alan Greenspan and Reagan formed to save SS in 1983. That portion of the agreement is still set to go in 2018, when benefits start to exceed revenue.

So this debate is, in effect, about the wealthy holding up their end of the bargain on SS. Which we all know they want to welch on the agreement.

[oneold1-4u]

25. If what we must buy--

Was grown and manufactured at least 90% within the US, which was the plan for future prosperity,(1935) then our nations value in all aspects would be the greatest in the world. There will never be a total balance of trade in this world in any case. Jobs for all means taxes and SS being paid by more persons each day. If good national economics had remained we could still buy milk and bread on minimum wage, but they now have to furnish it free to the children! When they take that away the children die and they won't need more jobs!
They are taking more of everything every day! Tomorrow is just the next day!

[PapaJoe]

29. dubya em dee

The ramifications of this assault of SS are continuing to astound me.
This is a very calculated battle of class warfare. It is based on idelogical calvinistic precepts. When this battle is over, Social Security will be better and stronger for the fight....at least, I hope so.

[Ellie of Amherst]

19. It should be required curriculum

It will never happen (teachers are too busy teaching kids how to pass these damndable tests, and besides it is counter to the neocon agenda), but I think this teacher's idea of sending her students to internships with social service agencies was brilliant, and this type of activity should be required of all high school seniors.

I like the idea that she had them in ongoing internships because they were exposed to the brutal realities of poverty more so than just going to a soup kitchen and handing out sandwiches for an hour or so.

If we want a compassionate society we have to instill those values into our young people. I am inclined to believe nowadays that compassion and caring for our neighbors is really NOT one of our values--it's just lip service.

[Demit]

20. I do think that was one of the hidden goals of NCLB. Make the teachers

spend time teaching to the test, and they don't have time to tell kids what they really need to know. The federal government in effect controls the educational content.

BTW, Ellie, welcome to DU!

[Ellie of Amherst]

30. exactly

An illiterate citizenry is a compliant citizenry. Just teach them the bare necessities--how to read and perform some math computations. If that's all they can do, (or less) then they are less likely to be aware of civil, consumer or labor rights. They won't know history and be able to recognize when we are repeating our mistakes. They won't know that global warming really does exist and that the universe was not really created in seven days by some guy living up in the sky. But most importantly, they won't learn how to question anything that is presented to them.

[TexasLawyer]

43. And another hidden goal

Structure the program to make it easy, even for good schools, to earn a failing grade. The public schools' student base and income can be eroded through the issuance of vouchers. Over time, the education function can be handed over to private enterprise, preferably big supporters of the GOP. An added side benefit (and built-in profit-center)-- teacher salaries can be substantially reduced in order to enhance the private company's bottom line.

[Negatron]

21. Poverty: been there, done that, became a Democrat.

I will be 30 in a few weeks. For most of my adult life, my income has been less than $7,000 a year. I've spent time in shelters, living, eating, and talking with the poorest of the poor. As a young man, I was a Republican, due to family influence. After spending a few years in shelters, basements, and motels, I became a Democrat. For the last few years, I've been on a fixed income of just over 500 a month, and I'm doing better than ever before. I even have some change for charity every now and then. I can say with confidence that the poverty issue is the main reason I am a Democrat. The Republican prescription of hard work doesn't work for everyone. If, for whatever reason, one doesn't have the genetic or psychological constitution to go that route, there has to be some kind of safety net. The alternative, which is saying "to hell with them," becomes a lot more difficult when you live and eat with "them," and when you are one of "them."

[Ellie of Amherst]

22. Horatio Alger story is a myth

"The Republican prescription of hard work doesn't work for everyone. "

So true, Negatron. That whole idea of "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps" is a ridiculous notion that is perpetuated as some sort of scientific fact.

My response to people who try to pull that argument is "If it were so damned easy to do, don't you think people would do it???"

[kineneb]

31. Can't pull yourself up by the bootstraps

...if you don't even have socks. Try telling someone like my husband to save for retirement...laid off from WorldCom, insulin-dependent diabetes w/renal complications, no health insurance except the state low-income program. We have no savings except the house we live in. And if I didn't take Paxil everyday, I would be in a psych ward in a backward-facing jacket. Yeah, sure, bootstraps, my butt.

My grandparents spent the first year or so of the Depression living in a tent-house on the great-grandparents' farm. It had a wood stove and a bed. They felt really lucky that they had a place to live. They were never fanatic about saving stuff but they never threw anything really useful away. They taught me gardening, canning and how to work with my hands. I am one of the women who consider power tools as important as kitchen tools. For their instruction I am grateful.

[TexasLawyer]

23. And on the Social Security front,

poverty is an especially important issue, since the elderly are often unable to fend for themselves. Without a universal safety net, there WILL be old people living in alleys and freezing in the dark.

[rodeodance]

32. I agree

[GetTheRightVote]

33. I know what it is to be so poor that 50 cents for a soda was hard to get

Man was it hard to deal with but I will never forget it, it stays with you, the experience of it, poverty. Seeing in a car because you have nothing for rent or bills, man it was bad. You are lucky if you have never been there or done it. On the other hand, it is too bad more do not experience it so they understand more of what some Americans are going thru today. Everyone should be forced into the situation of poverty for 6 months so they too would never forget it. Their greed and love of money would change quickly I would hope.

:kick:

[scarletlib]

34. see the article by William Raspberry posted 2/5/05

for all those who have forgotten or never seen real poverty its about to get much closer to them.

I spent my entire work life working with the poor. I also can never forget the stories my grandmother and mother told me about how they suffered in the depression.

Even so, I have always felt that compared to third world nations that most Americans have been relatively well off. However, if this happens we will begin to see people living in 3rd world conditions here in this country.

I wonder how this will play with mom and pop in the heartland.

[TexasLawyer]

35. Mom and Pop in the heartland will be OK--

'cause at least GAY people won't be married!

[tavalon]

39. Mom and Pop in the heartland

have already shown what they plan to do about worsening conditions - vote Republican. The story of why they would vote against their wellbeing is a complex one, explained in a couple of books and in their churches. We need to figure out how to influence these people back. Unfortunately, appealing to logic won't work or the Rethugs wouldn't have gotten their vote.

[indepat]

37. We're sledding down a path which will show us first-hand what poverty is

[Learning2Fly]

38. Social Security was also mandated

for the benefit of future generations of people like my grandmother and mother, who had no assistance in their day. Despite the booming economy of the 1920's the stock market crashed in 1929, agriculture prices were depressed and massive unemployment and poverty for millions followed for years. My mother was a teenager in 1936 when her father died unexpectedly. She was forced to quit high school and work to help support her mother and elderly grandmother. Since the advent of Social Security, widows and minor children are eligible to receive a monthly benefit payment. This would have made a huge difference in the live's of my mother and grandmother. Yet, Bush does not speak of what happens to this particular benefit on the way to privatization.

[oneold1-4u]

40. Poverty destroyed

Poverty today is living on SS check that is less than $600. Then they give us all that big hearted charity; subsidized housing and sometimes partial utilities, medicare and medicaid, food stamps, food banks, meals on wheels! Just the cost of paper work and administration of these reaches very close to the value so it only means supporting more government jobs and appointees. The income of one appointee annually would cover a $200 a month raise for thousands getting less than $500 a month SS.

[Hidden Stillness]

41. They Were Our Parents

Thank you to DU for posting these "WWII generation" topics--this thread, the Tom Joad link, and "America's Seniors are not Cowards" by Mary Pitt, in the Articles section--it has gotten me thinking about that generation again. They were my parents.

I had been taking care of my Mom when she died, eight years ago, and after I got over the worst of the shock and depression of her death--I still miss her--I started to think back on some of the qualities she had given me. So much of what I took to be my own good qualities, I now deeply realized, I had gotten from her. Whenever I took the effort to learn about something and express myself well on a topic, whenever I felt sympathy for suffering and hatred for the abuser, whenever I considered fairness and decent treatment for all a basic American necessity, I realized I had gotten it all from her. When the person is gone, all you have left is the thought, and I spent a lot of time dwelling on what that generation did to make this a great country, and one where devastating problems could actually be solved. It is almost incomprehensible to realize that, as they leave us and their numbers grow smaller, this wonderful, cheerfully compassionate group's accomplishments may be needlessly ripped apart by rich-boy fuckheads like Bush, Cheney, and the rest of that crowd. That group never changes; they are always traitors.

I have had money problems during my life, but the Depression-era perspective of my parents--pay bills first, buy enough food to last a couple of weeks just in case you can't get to a store, don't splurge on yourself unless you really actually have extra money (although they always gave us whatever we wanted as kids)--has allowed me to live sometimes on very little, and do surprisingly well. I am so grateful for that, for all the heartache I was spared, just by not being stupid. The economy is not doing well, no matter how they claim it is. I am from the industrial Midwest; we were devastated at the loss of jobs years ago, and we have not recovered (Democratic state, by the way).

By the way, you are not paying higher taxes because of Social Security, etc. You pay higher taxes because the percentage of the tax burden paid by corporations has gone down to almost nothing since the 1980s. During the'50s, corporations paid 40% and individuals 60%, which was why the economy was stronger then, even easily recovering from the 1955-56 Eisenhower recession, because of the stronger tax base (yet another Republican who can't run an economy). During the '80s it slipped to corporations covering 17% of the tax bill (all this from "America: What Went Wrong?" by Bartlett and Steele); and by now it is so low it is almost nothing. You pick it up so rich boy won't have to--that is why.

This also remended me of an experiment that two members of Congress conducted during the early '80s. A liberal Democrat and a conservative Repub (can't remember either name) tried to live on median-income-level welfare checks only, for three months. The Repub, who must've been a real idiot--then as now--thought it was not only possible but easy. Of course, neither could make the check stretch anywhere near a whole month, and had to call off the experiment, admitting that you cannot, after all, live on that puny amount. They didn't listen then, they don't listen now.

I also believe that people will not have the sufficient resolve to want to tackle this issue and really end poverty, which has not even been considered since Johnson, unless they suffer some of it themselves. Live in a 60-degree F. house during Winter because you can't get the heating fixed, or be hungry and won't have money for another week. Then you'll know fear.

This wonderful generation, who never even asked to be thanked for the whole world of democratic structures they set up, kinder to each other than we are today, working all to the general good, with an attitude that critcized exploitation and taking advantage rather than rewarding it, looking out for each other, being a troublemaker and fighting the Republican enemy, but politely--all these things I think back on now that both of my parents are gone and left only their works, and I realize, as I thank God for them--they were right, all along.

[ikojo]

42. Not everyone has forgotten what poverty is...

some of us did not grow up comfortably middle class. My memories of being poor in the US are not of a prosaic past made known in the movies but of a reality lived in the 1970s and 1980s.