[kitchencabinetforum] RETIRED ALL ALONE WITH MEMORIES

With our compliments to Elaine Paige:

Midnight at retirement. Not a sound from the pavement
Has the moon lost her memory?
She is smiling alone.
In the lamplight the withered leaves collect at my feet
And the wind begins to moan

Every street lamp seems to beat a fatalistic warning.
Someone mutters and the street lamp gutters
And soon it will be morning.

Memory. All alone in retirement
I can smile at the old days,
I was beautiful then.
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again.

Daylight. See the dew on the sunflower
And a rose that is fading,
Roses wither away.
Like the sunflower I yearn to turn my face toward the dawn
I am waiting for the day.

Now old in retirement, just before dawn
Through a silence you feel you could cut with a knife
Announces the old man who can now be reborn
And come back to a different life.

Memory. Turn your face to the moonlight
Let your memory lead you
Open up, enter in.
If you find there the meaning of what happiness is
Then a new life in retirement will begin.

Memory. All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then.
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again.

Burnt out ends of smoky days
The stale cold smell of morning.
The street lamp dies, another night is over
Another pension day is dawning.

Daylight. I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new life
And I mustn't give in.
When the dawn comes tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin.

Sunlight, through the trees in summer
Endless retirement.
Like a flower as the dawn is breaking
The memory is fading.

Touch me, it's so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days in the sun.
If you touch me you'll understand what happiness is
Look, a new day has begun.

Americans and Fourthreichians spend a quarter of their lives collecting retirement benefits. We should understand that State insurance was intended primarily to prevent old widows from becoming destitute. Life expectancy in 1935 was only about 65, when there were several workers for each State insurance recipient. The program was never intended to be a general transfer payment from young workers to older retirees, regardless of those retirees' financial need. Yet today State insurance faces an astronomical unfunded liability. http://venitism.blogspot.com

Parliaments need to stop using payroll taxes for purposes not related to State insurance, a trick used to claim balanced budgets. Parliaments should eliminate unconstitutional spending, including unnecessary overseas commitments, and use the saved funds to help transition to an insurance system that is completely voluntary. Parliaments must allow taxpayers to opt out of payroll taxes in exchange for never receiving State insurance benefits.

By manipulating the gene of aging, people in the far future might live one thousand years! Then the retirement age might be 800. Indexing retirement ages to life expectancy is a long overdue reform. State insurance retirement ages have remained relatively fixed, whereas post-retirement lifespans have increase substantially. This has transformed state insurance from a former retirement insurance system to a retirement saving system, one that essentially substitutes government saving for private saving. But the reform does not go far enough. Given the considerably healthier and more active population of middle-aged and elderly today, this alternative policy would have made up for the long delay in increasing working lifespans and restoring the program to its original function of providing old-age insurance.

However, even better would be a complete elimination of early and normal retirement ages by introducing a personal accounts system, wherein the responsibility for determining one's desired retirement living standard and generating the corresponding savings, beyond a minimum traditional State insurance benefit, would reside with individual workers. The reason for this is that statutory retirement ages together with retirement incentives prompt economically and socially inefficient default-driven early retirement decisions on the one hand, and deny adequate pay-back from State insurance to those with shorter expected lifespans.

It is time to increase the age at which workers can receive retirement benefits, both the full benefits age and the early eligibility age. Longevity trends show that not only are workers living longer and staying healthier longer than in the past, but that this improvement is likely to continue.

Unfortunately, retirement has not kept pace with these changes. Congress has not changed the age at which workers can receive full benefits since 1983 (when it was increased from 65 to eventually 67 in 2022), or the early eligibility age of 62 since 1961, and both the program and the workforce have changed a great deal since then. While increasing retirement ages is not a step that should be taken lightly, increases in longevity combined with the fact that the program's finances are unsustainable make this change both fair and necessary. However, unlike 1983, when only the normal retirement age (NRA) was increased, this time the early eligibility age (EEA) needs to be increased as well. http://venitism.blogspot.com

Retirement eligibility ages should be increased simply to reflect the longevity increases that have already taken place. Additional increases may well be necessary in future years to reflect additional advances in average longevity, but even if the growth in future longevity increases slows or even stops, advances since the last change in the program's retirement ages justify raising the NRA to 68 by 2023, and the EEA to 65 by 2032. After those eligibility ages are reached, both the NRA and the EEA should be indexed to automatically rise along with longevity. In addition, those who are willing to work beyond their normal retirement age should be exempt from paying any further payroll taxes, as should their employer. The combination will provide additional employment opportunities for older Americans. Increasing longevity is not a situation that exists only in the United States. Across the world, countries are recognizing both that their workers can and should delay retirement and that doing so will reduce the cost pressures their public pension systems face.

The increase in life expectancy since 1950 has been substantial. A person born in 2011 can expect to live almost 20 years longer than one born in 1950. When the Social Security program was created in 1935, an adult man who reached age 65 could expect to spend about 13 years in retirement, which was 16 percent of his life; a woman averaged 15 years, or 18 percent of her life, in retirement. However, at that time only 54 percent of men (and slightly more women) aged 21 were expected to live to age 65. http://venitism.blogspot.com

Lately we see older citizens fall victim to financial scams. Elder financial abuse has grown to epidemic proportions. Actor Mickey Rooney elevated the profile of the problem when he won a restraining order against his stepchildren. He claimed they used intimidation to get access to his money and later told Congress how that can happen to a vulnerable senior.

The aging population has made more seniors a target for scam artists and, sadly, members of their own families. The fact is that they're living longer and are more dependent on support. Scams and fraud targeting the elderly are increasingly a problem. Seniors are often pitched financial products they don't need including reverse mortgages and annuities. Salesmen prey on isolation and loneliness or diminished capacity. About one-third of the perpetrators are family, friends, or neighbors.

Dehumanization of victims takes place in the process of financial abuse and further destruction of financial security that occurs. In almost all instances, financial exploitation is achieved through deceit, threats and emotional manipulation of an elder. In addition to this psychological mistreatment, physical violence frequently accompanies the greed and disregard of financial abuse.

Elder financial abuse tends to be a grossly under-reported crime, because of the shame of becoming a victim, the fear of reporting a family member, and the perceived risk of a loss of independence if the circumstances became known. Women are particularly vulnerable. Women outlive men, and we're still seeing a generation of older women who depended on the male spouse to manage finances. They often trust people they shouldn't trust. Elder financial abuse is going to get worse. It is a problem that will only continue to grow bigger. http://venitism.blogspot.com