Social Security and Medicare work

[deminks]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/14/1016903/-Social-Security-and-Medicare-work?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Steven Benen riffs on this great chart from the Census bureau, highlighted by Suzy Khimm.

The increase in the past decade in the poverty rate for children, shown in the blue line, now at 22 percent, is horrendous, and should be keeping policy-makers up nights. But look at the red line, the poverty rate for seniors, which has dropped from 35.2 percent in 1959 to just 9.0 percent. Benen:

As of 2010, despite growing poverty throughout the economy, Khimm noted, “lder Americans are even less likely to be in poverty than they were during the start of the recession. <...> he poverty rate for seniors is at a record low: in 2009, it was at 8.9 percent, and it’s remained essentially flat since then.”

This isn’t an accident and it’s not a fluke. Indeed, note that on the left side of the chart, as of a half-century ago, those most likely to be in poverty were seniors.

So what happened? Social Security and Medicare happened. These pillars of modern American life have brought a degree of stability and economic security to millions of older people who've left the workforce.

[louslobbs]

1. That's why the Republicans want to get rid of these "earned benefits," they work and people love the

stability they provide in later life, and since they paid for these future benefits out of their pay checks, why shouldn't they feel "entitled" to these benefits that they've 'earned" (having paid into the system all of their working lives) in order to fund the benefit trust fund that was designed as insurance to be paid to them when they retired. The SS trust fund would have been fine had politicians not borrowed from it without paying the funds back and if they would just raise the cap so people like me can continue to pay above the capped 106 thousand dollars where I stop paying into the system, but I continue to make a few hundred thousand more during the year in salary and bonus. There's nothing wrong with SS and Medicare that couldn't be fixed by voting out every Republican in every election state and federal every where.....and some Dem's too of course. They all make me sick to my stomach... the rich, corporations and their bought and paid for government who do their bidding against the rest of us.
Lou