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.
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