This is an interesting artifact. The author, a Reagan era coprolite, says that you should hate your elderly neighbors on Social Security because they are thieving swine.
Readers may recall the 1950s TV show, "The Millionaire," which portrayed stories of individuals who were given a "no strings attached" gift of money by an anonymous benefactor. Each week in one of the show's opening scenes, a man representing the wealthy benefactor, John Beresford Tipton Jr., knocked on an unsuspecting recipient's door and announced: "My name is Michael Anthony and I have a cashier's check for you for one million dollars."
Given that the burden of this op-ed is that old people are sponges, beginning with a pop-culture reference that only old people will get, one wonders, what the fuck.
That TV program is scheduled to return next year as a reality show, and the new recipients will be the typical husband and wife who reach age 66 and qualify for Social Security. Starting next year, this typical couple, receiving the average benefit, will begin collecting a combination of cash and health-care entitlement benefits that will total $1 million over their remaining expected lifetime.
According to my calculations based on government data, such married couples will begin receiving monthly Social Security checks that will, on average, total about $550,000 after inflation. They will receive health-care services paid for by Medicare that, on average, will total another $450,000 after inflation. The benefactors will be a generation of younger workers who are trying to support themselves and their families while paying taxes to finance the rest of government spending.
Oh, er, OK.
I'm fascinated: who the heck is the author's imagined audience? If it is elderly voters, the appeal escapes me. "We are currently giving you a million dollars. I propose we cease giving you a million dollars." !
I repeat:
!
If the intended audience is younger people, the argument is, apparently, fuck grandma, and you can't have your million dollars.
In short, then, the author hopes to appeal to idiots.
The Washington Post opinion page inmates....
But there is even lots of stupidity in the above premise. If you expect to receive a million dollars over the course of 20 years or so, you are not a "millionaire," in the sense that you do not have a million dollars to spend, because, holy shit, am I even having to explain this. You have a fraction of a million dollars to spend each year. Perhaps 1/20th of a million annualy. (Checks 8th grade fractions.) Yep. 1/20th. Which is... (rechecks)... Yep. Less than a million.
And if pretty much half of that million dollars is going to health expenses that probably fewer than one percent of Americans could ever afford to pay out of pocket, but that almost 100% of Americans will surely face...
The point is that (simplifying grotesquely for rhetorical effect) the reason old people in America get a million dollars each is because that is what it fucking costs to be old in America. And that's a lowball!
Of course if you are more outraged at Grandma & Grandpa not eating dogfood than you are at rich people and coroprations having to pay their fucking taxes, well, fuck you, I guess.
Nice try at turning old people on fixed incomes into, uh, Goldman Sachs. Golf clap.