Why young Americans should be very afraid

Mom and Dad are moving in with you as soon as they reach 65. Get that spare bedroom ready, move brothers and sisters in together. We’re turning back the clock to pre-World War II: The family unit is back and the retired are, once again, about to be the burden of those still working. Come to think of it, little Johnny and Suzy had better get an after-school job to help the family make ends meet. And you can forget about school loans for the high-school graduates, that first car, holidays or remodeling your kitchen — no one will be able to afford them soon, either.You see, Granny and Granddad paid — through all those decades — for Social Security and Medicare. They planned for their retirement, no, not by having huge savings in a bank — there never was enough to put away really. What they did, as 65 percent of all Americans did, was to pay taxes and pay into the system. It’s like paying into a bank account for your retirement, only the government was handling their savings. They were promised Social Security retirement pay. Even if it was penny-pinching tight, at least they could live in their house and eat. They were promised Medicare medical coverage, even if it wasn’t as fancy as private insurance coverage at times, at least it was a safety net.u u uBut the Republicans in Congress this last week voted their first big anti-little guy measure: They want (and passed the vote) to cancel Medicare in favor of a private insurance plan. In other words, all those years of paying into the system are for nothing. You want medical insurance? You will now need to buy it from a private insurance company. The Republicans counter with an offer of a voucher system. They’ll give you a voucher you can trade in with a private insurance company to get minimal coverage. Of course, there is no guarantee the voucher will be worth anything and, on top of that, there will be a deductible, maybe as much as $10,000 per person. Get sick? The first $10,000 is on you. How the heck is someone living hand-to-mouth in this economy supposed to have $10,000 put aside for medical deductibles? Well, that’s OK because Congress members are covered by your tax dollar, no deductible of course, so it is easy for them to tell you to tough it out. They have no clue how hard it is to make ends meet for 65 percent of Americans.Bush Jr. tried this with Social Security, tried to privatize it. The whole nation stood up and said, “No! Hands off our savings, our planned retirement.” Will the nation stand up now and tell Boehner and Co. that privatizing Medicare is similarly immoral and theft on a grand scale? Maybe not. Why not? Because the young really have no idea what illness and old age ailments are like. The very system that has allowed families to live in separate houses and get on with their private lives (Mom and Dad don’t normally live with Granny and Granddad) has allowed the healthy to overlook and be ignorant of the dependence our seniors have on proper medical care without fees.u u uLook, let’s put this another way: Medicare is free for retired people. They do not (any longer) have to think about paying those bills, paying monthly premiums. They can rely on it; it is a benefit earned by paying their share over the decades. When privatized, as the Republicans just forced through the House with a full-court party-line press, will Granny pay the oil-heating bill or the medical insurance bill in the dead of winter. Remember last winter? What would you do? And what will Granny do when she gets ill? “Hello, Son and Daughter, I need help.” And then Son and Daughter say to their kids, “Put your futures on hold, our parents need help.”Now, across the nation seniors are angry at the Republicans’ plan, which is expected. What I would like to remind the young — yes, even you teenagers — is that your responsibility for your parents just shot up and will, no doubt, get worse. Are you ready? Will you take care of your bed-ridden parent with no insurance, a parent who may need 24-hour nursing? And if you do, who’s going to pay your bills if you cannot work? And let’s not forget Republicans want to, once again, try and privatize Social Security as well. They want your savings in Wall Street bankers’ hands. Now there’s a safe idea. Not.u u uWhy do you need to worry about all this? Because Medicare and Social Security payments, made faithfully and honestly over decades, have been raided by each successive administration. Has the government taken the principle money? Nope, that’s against the law. What they have done is take loans against the interest the money has earned and, surprise, never paid loans back at anything approaching commercial interest rates. It is like your savings account being raided and instead of 4 percent or more you got back half a percent. How, why, is this possible? Again, those people in the House of Representatives have passed laws allowing them to do so. The president doesn’t make laws, they do.There is a chance the Senate can stop all this nonsense, but the forces in Washington are rallying to help Boehner and his team to gut your parents’ security in retirement. And when they do — and they have passed the first step — you’re the ones having to pick up the pieces. Of course, you could always ask your parents to do the honorable thing, like aging Eskimos, and get on an iceberg and sail out to death at sea. Maybe, as Scrooge said, what Boehner is really after is “to decrease the surplus population.” One day, youth of America, that would be you. Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.