Sections
• Top Stories - Front Page
• National
• State and Local
• Business and Economic
• Lifestyle and Entertainment
• Sports
• Editorials

• Comments

The Not Yet Gazette is a fictional newspaper showing one possible future. The stories in the paper reflect major demographic trends projected for Minnesota.

Should Society Bail Out Elderly Grasshoppers?

Editorials

One of the most difficult and contentious issues of the day is what to do about the rising poverty levels among older Americans. This debate has been stirred up again in the wake of new congressional proposals to raise taxes in order to increase Social Security payments for low-income retirees.

The plight of elderly grasshoppers, named after the "live-for-today" insects despised by hard-working ants in the famous folk tale, has aroused both sympathy and scorn. Opinions often cross generational lines; elderly ants who put away enough for a comfortable retirement are often unsympathetic toward their poverty-stricken peers. Like many younger people, they feel we should not raise taxes to bail out older people who failed to save for their retirement. In their view, if old people are poor, it is their own fault. They should have saved more. Private charity and family members can help the needy elderly, say critics of the tax increase. As a last resort, they suggest, expand the ElderDorm program.

Those favoring more aid for poor elderly people feel this is a cruel view more worthy of the 19th century than the 21st. Brooke Kaiser of the Minnesota Gray Rights Movement points out, "Many older people were unable to save money because their wages were too low. In addition, people of that generation expected Social Security would be kept at the same levels their parents and grandparents had. How were they to know the average monthly benefit would be slashed to 10 percent of its 1995 value, in real dollars?"

So far, voters have demonstrated they will not stand for the tax increases needed to keep all older people above the poverty line. Nobody can be happy with the ElderDorm system, but it may be the best we can hope for with our current lopsided age distribution. (Trends: aging, rising dependency ratio)