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Vol. 79/No. 38 October 26, 2015
Gap in life expectancy widens
between workers, wealthy
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
Life expectancy is rising — not so much for working people, but for
those with the most money, said a recent study by the National Academies
of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
For men in the top 20 percent by income, life expectancy rose by 7.1
years, to nearly 89 years, for those born in 1960 compared to those born
in 1930. Over the same period it fell for the 20 percent of men with the
lowest wages, to 76 years — a 13-year gap. There is a similar, but
smaller, differential for women.
As a result, those with the highest incomes collect significantly more
in Social Security benefits over a lifetime, the report’s authors conclude.
“We are spending the most money for the longest periods to protect
people who need the least protection,” economist Robert Samuelson
commented on the study in the Washington Post Sept. 27. Pitting the
young against the old, he added, “We are penalizing the future to pay
for the past.”
His answer? Make workers wait longer to collect Social Security, and cut
benefits for those at the top.
This isn’t a new idea. Democratic and Republican legislators have been
chipping away at Social Security for decades, including raising the
eligibility age from 65 to 67, increasing payroll taxes and periodically
issuing warnings that funds will soon run out.
Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes presents an
opposite view in the book Capitalism’s World Disorder. The capitalist
crisis today is not “primarily an economic crisis,” he wrote in 1993.
“It is the great political and moral crisis of our time.”
“Social Security was an initial step by our class — by those who produce
wealth — toward conquering the social organization of conditions
necessary for life, such as education and health care, for a lifetime,”
he continued.
The Social Security Act was adopted in 1935, a concession by the
capitalist rulers in response to increased working-class struggles
spearheading a rising industrial union movement during the Depression
years. Out of the Black rights battles of the 1950s and early ’60s, the
working class won its extension to include Medicare for the elderly and
Medicaid for workers with low incomes.
When the bosses’ economists and pundits start making coldly actuarial
arguments to turn Social Security from an entitlement into a
means-tested charity, it’s an attack on the solidarity and unity of the
working class. It undermines the fight to establish a universal social
wage as a right for all — regardless of class or income.
“Workers think of each other in terms of a lifetime. We cannot think of
each other the way capitalists think of us. We cannot make ourselves
think of other human beings as though they do not exist up to the age of
thirteen or after the age of sixty-five,” Barnes said. “We have a
different class view, a different moral view of society.”
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