A Generation without a Safety Net

What is the US going to do with tens of millions of seniors who, in the years ahead, will not have enough money to live independently? There is a vaguely 19th century air about all this – will the elderly be warehoused in poor houses? If your solution is “Let them live with their families like in the old days,” that is unrealistic when most women are working, families are alienated, and everyone is financially stressed.

We now have a generation of people in their forties and fifties who do not realize (so far as I can tell) that there is no safety net to look forward to. Perhaps there never was, but few understand that Social Security payments will not be enough for them to live on and they are not saving anything. Not only that, some will not be eligible for Social Security because they didn’t contribute for enough years; some families that have split apart do not understand how Social Security works and will either not apply or apply too early; others have gone through their 401Ks because of the recession, or their pension plans are underfunded and eroding, or they cannot sell their house; and some who came here as immigrants (legal and illegal) will not qualify for Social Security. I can see many ending up on Supplemental Security Income, which is pegged just above the poverty line, and on Medi-Cal.

It’s ridiculous and it doesn’t have to be this way. Other countries have social safety nets. Why isn’t ours a lot better?

For another perspective, try this great New Yorker story which asks:

This decade will deliver the first cohort of senior citizens who reached adulthood after the liberalizations of the sixties—the baby boomers are collecting Social Security. As a consequence, we’re starting to encounter a group of old folks for whom aloneness is a choice, an identity, an exercise of freedom. And the ethics of senior care will change as a result. If Mom has lived alone, successfully and proudly, for four decades, is it socially responsible to move her to a home when she stops remembering to pay her gas bill? Or is it an offense against the person she has spent adulthood laboring to be?

Photo: Wikipedia