Writing Off The Elderly – –Is Euthanasia An Option for the Elderly in the US Soon?

By Paul Craig Roberts

When
neoconservatives, politicians, and high ranking military officers speak
of a 30-year war against terrorism, there is no discussion about its
affordability or whether the one significant attack (September 11, 2001)
that is attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to Muslim terrorists justifies
an open-ended war against a dozen countries. There is no discussion of
the burden on future generations of the massive increase in the public
debt in order to finance today’s wars.

Affordability and
intergenerational burdens are topics reserved for the discussion of
Social Security. Conservatives and libertarians constantly assert that
Social Security is unaffordable and decry the intergenerational basis
for Social Security retirement.

Recently economist Walter
Williams again made the argument that Social Security is not a
retirement program, because the income earner’s payroll tax payments do
not go into an account for the person paying the taxes, but instead are
used to pay benefits for older people who have reached retirement age.
Williams characterizes Social Security retirees as thieves who outvote
those still in the work force and have the ear of Congress. http://lewrockwell.com/williams-w/w-williams128.html

This
is an ideological argument that overlooks that Social Security is a
pact between generations. The working generations provide retirement
incomes for the elderly and in turn are provided retirement incomes by
succeeding generations. Terminating Social Security for the elderly
also terminates it for those who follow.

In other words, it is incorrect to describe Social Security as the elderly using the political system to steal from the young.

It
is also not the case that Social Security retirees have the ear of
Congress. The time is long past when Social Security was “the third rail
of politics.” Since the 1980s Congress has been cutting back Social
Security benefits in a number of ways. For example, the retirement age
is being extended from 65 to 67, and the switch from a real cost of
living adjustment to a substitution-based consumer price index results
in the erosion of the real value of Social Security benefits, which was
the reason for the switch. Up to 85% of Social Security benefits are now
subject to income tax if the recipient has earnings or other retirement
income above a minimum amount. The taxation of Social Security was
another way that the political system reneged on the promised benefits.

In
addition, during the 1980s Alan Greenspan and David Stockman
accelerated the phase-in of payroll tax increases that the Carter
administration had enacted. By causing the payroll tax to rise before it
was needed to finance benefits, more than $2 trillion has been
collected than was paid out in benefits. The government spent the
earmarked payroll tax revenues (leaving non-marketable IOUs in their
place) on other things, such as the wars of the 21st century. As none
of this $2 trillion reached retirees, the real “theft” from those of
working age was committed by Greenspan and Stockman for the benefit of
other spending programs.

None of this is to say that there are not
legitimate criticisms of Social Security. One is that Social Security
does not provide a personal nest egg that a retiree can either spend
down or manage carefully, living off the investment income and passing
on any remainder to heirs, thus building wealth in society. Moreover,
those who die prior to reaching retirement age or soon after retirement
do not receive any benefits. In an effort to address this problem,
Social Security pays survivors’ benefits to widows and children,
benefits that were reduced during the 1980s.

The uninformed blame
President Reagan for these assaults on Social Security. However, the
changes were demanded by Wall Street’s political minions, who backed
Reagan into a corner with hype about “the Reagan deficits.”

In
Chile part of the economic reconstruction from the chaos of the Allende
era was the privatization of Social Security. Deductions from wages
automatically go into personal investment accounts. Years ago when I
examined the system, it was working, building wealth for Chileans and
providing a source of savings for the economy.

It might have
been possible in the Reagan years to phase in a transition to a
privatized retirement system. With the Dow Jones at 1000 and the economy
rising, such a transition might have succeeded, but few policymakers
cared to be associated with the risk.

If the transition had been
undertaken, it might have saved us the current financial crisis, which
was brought on by deregulation. I doubt that Congress would have gone
along with deregulating a financial system upon which the elderly were
entirely dependent. Glass-Steagall would still be on the books,
derivatives would not have been deregulated, the equity market would not
have become a gambling casino dominated by high-frequency trading, and
the need for stability in Treasury bond prices would have curtailed
budget deficits and the explosive growth of the public debt in the 21st
century.

However, to propose today to privatize Social Security
is to ignore the two large stock market crashes of the 21st century that
inflicted enormous damage to private pension plans. It is to ignore the
Federal Reserve’s policy of attempting to stabilize a broken financial
system with interest rates so low that Treasury bonds pay a negative
rate of return. It is to ignore that income growth for most Americans
has dried up and if properly deflated is declining, thus threatening the
income base for retirement whether public or private, and that poverty,
especially among the elderly, is rapidly rising.

Indeed, the debt
and money creation associated with the ongoing bailouts of the large
banks are threatening the exchange value of the US dollar and its role
as world reserve currency. Values of dollar denominated financial assets
can suffer large declines if the rest of the world moves away from the
dollar as reserve currency.

Another problem facing future
retirement incomes is the growing practice of corporations laying off or
firing older employees in order to reduce payroll costs and the cost of
employer-provided medical benefits.

What we have witnessed in
the 21st century is a clear decision by political elites and the private
interests that control them that gratuitous wars are more important
than the elderly. In the budget deliberations it is not the trillion
dollar annual budgets of the military/security complex that are seen as
excessive. Instead, the focus is on cutting the sparse benefits for the
elderly.

Decades of right-wing and libertarian propaganda
against Social Security have hardened the hearts of political elites,
media, and even it sometimes seems of AARP against the elderly, who are
portrayed as an expensive burden. With the economy dying as a result of
jobs offshoring and the concentration of economic activity into fewer
hands, the elderly are not well positioned to compete for shrinking
resources against the claims of powerful interest groups, such as the
military/security complex and the neoconservative “war on terror.” Tax
revenues are drying up not only from unemployment but also from the
substitution of lower paying domestic service jobs for the higher income
jobs that have been moved offshore. A decline in the dollar’s exchange
value will push millions of Americans below the poverty line.

I
have always thought that abortion had ominous implications for the
elderly. Whatever the inconvenience of an unwanted child, it is small
compared to the claim of Social Security and Medicare on society’s
resources. A society comfortable with killing the unborn will lack the
moral scruples to reject euthanasia.

It is not difficult to
imagine the US government assigning a specified number of retirement
years to citizens, and then you take a pill. The declining respect for
life is also indicated by the fact that there is no move to impeach
Obama for drawing up lists of people, including US citizens, to be
executed without due process and by the fact that few Americans even
blink an eye at the murder by their government of hundreds of thousands
of Muslims in the name of a hoax "war on terror." With society's
resources shrinking, the demonization of Social Security endangers the
elderly.