Alex Hates Old People

Alexandra Fulin Baldwin (The Great, The Emperor, IV)

House Republicans have introduced an Obamacare replacement, and no one seems happy. Defenders of Obamacare are upset that it rolls back some of the scope of Obamacare and some of the funding, while opponents of Obamacare are upset that it doesn’t roll back more than it does. It is not entirely certain that the bill will pass the House, and it seems really unlikely to get through the Senate, where a number of Republican Senators (Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, among others) have already expressed their intention of voting against it.

There are a lot of criticisms of the bill, which is one of the most amazingly unpopular pieces of proposed major legislation that I ever remember, but I am going to focus on one in particular that I find really irritating. We’re upset, it seems, because the new bill is going to ask old people to pay more for their own health care. It is, in the words of the David Cetner of the AARP (America’s Most Loathsome Lobbyist Organization) “an age tax.” The combination of decreased tax credits for the elderly and higher premiums for older people is a “double whammy” that is just super, super unfair to all of those poor seniors who are barely surviving on their meager fixed incomes.

Keep in mind that no one is asking them to actually pay for their own care…this is just a suggestion that they shoulder a larger (but still incomplete) portion of their obviously higher health care costs. Now that Mr. Cetner has made his opinions known on behalf of the Insurance Company that he works for (what, you thought the AARP was a non-profit advocate for seniors? That’s so silly of you!), I would like to offer a rebuttal to his decrepit constituents.

Fuck off.

Yea, that’s right; I’ve had more than I can take about the poor, disadvantaged seniors struggling to get by and desperately in need of more subsidies, benefits and tax breaks paid for by those of us in the workforce. Are there poor seniors? Absolutely. But there are a lot of poor young people, too. In fact, there are a lot more poor young people than there are poor seniors. And those seniors have built an economy and a society that will make it harder for those poor young people to get ahead than it ever was for today’s seniors.

Let’s start with a really awkward fact: old people are the richest segment of the population. They don’t earn as much as younger people (most of them don’t actually earn anything) but they have more.  A lot more. The median net worth of Americans over age 65 is five times that of Americans between ages 35-44. It is more than double that of people between 45 and 54, people who should be growing that net worth rapidly to solidify their own retirement as to not be in a position to have to leech off of their children and grandchildren. It is close to 40x more than the median net worth of Americans under 35, a number that is skewed by the fact that the median net worth for Americans between 18 and 35 is barely above zero.

In it a coincidence that our tax code punishes the earning of income more than it punishes the ownership of assets..?

I don’t mean to imply that every penny-pinching grandma in America is secretly living on Easy Street, and the truth is that the median net worth of seniors (~200k) is not all that impressive. I am just trying to remind everyone that a benefit given by government seniors is necessarily paid for by people who are, on the whole, poorer than the seniors receiving the benefit. {While we’re on the subject, whose fault is it that an entire generation of people have remarkably little savings despite spending their entire adult lives in a period of expanding economies, under-taxation and exploding asset prices? If a person merely paid their mortgage every month and didn’t save another nickel, he’d likely end up with more money than the median senior has. But sure, tell me how irresponsible Millennials are.}

Not only do seniors have more, but they also pay less for an awful lot of things. A website called seniordiscount.com claims to have identified 250,000 different discounts available to seniors. They get a higher standard income tax deduction, AND they get an additional senior tax credit just for being old. At the local level, they may very well get a property tax easement despite almost certainly already paying a lot less to live in their community than their neighbors.

Young people pay more for car insurance, because they present demonstrably higher risks and higher expected payments by the insurer. The expected health care costs of old people are larger than those of young people by a massive factor more than the opposite is true of car insurance expectations. Doesn’t it stand to reason that we would ask the richest Americans to pay more for a service they will use more than everyone else?

Seniors pay lower fares on public transportation and lower admissions to all kinds of events and public institutions (museums, theaters, etc.). Grocery stores give them discounts for shopping at certain times, pharmacies give them discounts, clothing stores offer discounts, and restaurants typically charge them less than they charge normal people. But next time you are in Applebee’s, ask your gainfully-employed but likely poorer-than-them server if seniors are in the habit of calculating their 12% tips during the early bird on the 15% senior discounted price or the actual retail price. (OK, that is totally unfair, but I couldn’t resist an early bird/cheap tipper joke).

Hold on, because it gets worse. Not only do seniors have more money than young people, and not only do they pay less for a huge range of things, but they lived their entire lives in a much easier economic environment than they have left for their kids. Today’s seniors had the opportunity to go to college without running up a debt equal to three or four times their first year’s salary. In a less-competitive global environment, it was a lot easier for the least capable, least skilled of them to earn a decent living. They also (at least until the 1980’s) didn’t have to pay 7% of their income to support entitlement payments to the old people of their day – and invisibly cost their employer just as much on top of that.

They bought houses before the value of those homes was inflated by government-incentives and mortgage guarantees. Then they sold those homes (realizing enormous non-taxable capital gains) to young people who took on large mortgages to buy out the equity of those old people. Old people didn’t inherit a national debt equal to GDP, or unfunded liabilities a multiple larger than that. In fact, they ran up most of that tab.

This is actually a really important point as we get ready for the inevitable cries of the “sacred promises” that we have made to seniors, or their own claims that they have “paid their fair share into the system and only want what they are entitled to.” There has never been a group of people at any time in human history who consumed more than they paid for on a scale even close to today’s American seniors. Why do we have a $20 T national debt? Because two generations of Americans consciously decided to never, ever pay for the government that they consumed, and repeatedly voted for candidates who promised to stick the bill with their kids.

Since 1957, the United States has been a net borrower ever single year. Every. Single. Year. Today’s 75 year old, in other words, has never once paid for the entirety of the government that he or she consumed in any single year. They argue during every election about who is or isn’t paying their fair share, ignoring the obvious answer to that question: nobody.

This doesn’t even take into account the unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities; it is just the straight cash in and out every year. They never ONCE paid for everything they consumed. They voted themselves tax cuts and new entitlements, started wars all over the world and grew every single tentacle of the Federal Government, but now they have the audacity to tell me and my peers that we’re the lazy entitled ones. That we have a moral obligation to make good on promises that they made to themselves.

This would be like the juniors on student council at a University passing a rule that said next year, all Seniors’ tuition is to be paid by Freshman, and then telling those new Freshman when they show up that they now have a moral obligation to make good on the promise. Excuse me while I sit over here not giving a shit about their obnoxious, bratty whining.

I’m sure this reads as a heartless dismissal of the real issues of poverty among seniors, which isn’t (wholly) my intention. In fact, if it were up to me, I’d suggest that we increase Social Security payments on the low end, funded by ending all benefits to the wealthiest seniors (explain to me why the “safety net” requires sending something like $2,500 a month to over 4 million recipients with a net worth of over $2 million). But please, in the interest of having an intellectually honest debate, spare me the crying about all of the “poor victims of this insipid new age tax.” If there are victims of the great inter-generational wealth wars, it is certainly not today’s senior citizens.

{Authors note: this totally doesn't apply to your Grandmother, who loves you very much and would never do anything to hurt you. We still love her.}