Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, August 20, 2010

Very Serious

The Very Serious rich white austerity-preachers are once again demanding market discipline for vulnerable majorities in order to protect their own ill-gotten treasure-piles. So, while they remain sublimely indifferent to the Fed's full-employment mission and propose raising the age of Social Security eligibility and pine for the gutting of Medicare, I thought it would be worth pointing out that I for one happen to think the age of Social Security eligibility should be dropped, not raised, to accommodate the real needs of older citizens in rapidly changing competitive job-markets. Although the most popular and successful US government program of all time, Social Security, is predicted by the Very Serious austerity-preachers soon to be in a Very Serious crisis, due in large part to all the longevity-gains the Very Serious futurologists keep barking hyperbolically about (although the relevant metric -- one would think, if one were a thinking sort of person and so, I suppose, not Very Serious -- life-expectancy for folks at the actual retirement age of 65 doesn't actually seem to be increasing particularly dramatically), it seems to me any looming crisis in the present system could easily be paid for by eliminating the cap on income taxed to pay for the program, and that indeed the program could be expanded to accommodate a lowering of the retirement age through this straightforward expedient, and to the benefit of us all. Meanwhile, rather than gutting Medicare, I think citizens should be able to buy in to Medicare before retirement age, the buy-in age beginning immediately for citizens 55 and older and then inching backward one year every year until we have a single payer system with all the cost- efficiency- equity- popularity- benefits that people who actually know stuff know would follow from this. It seems to me that saying these sorts of actually useful, actually helpful things should make one seem Very Serious. But oddly enough it seems that one doesn't have to know things or be right about things to be Very Serious, so much as simply always say things that will benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of the comparatively poor and precarious. This is, you know, a Very Serious problem.

No comments: