Baby Boomer Die-Off
There
Will Be No Social Security “Crisis”
IT'S NOT JUST THE FOOD YOU EAT, THOUGH
THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE...
Martha Rose Crow, M.S.
In July, I turned 52. Every time I have another birthday, I embrace
it with marvel and wonder because it’s a miracle that I’m still alive. This is because I am keenly aware that I
should have been dead a long time ago.
Yes, I’ve had some big health scares in my life, but I am aware that
something wicked is going on in American society. No, it’s not about Bush, his corrupt cronies
and a neutered congress. It’s much more
diabolical than that. The Baby Boomers
are dying off.
The day after my birthday, I checked my
email letters and found a frantic email from my Aunt Peach who lives in
southern Ohio. My first cousin Johnny
Ray or “Johnbo” had died (the day before my birthday). He had just turned 45 and had been sick with
some kind of virus that had caused him to have surgery on his hip and
back. Johnny Ray got up from the table
and dropped dead. I’m still waiting to
hear from relatives on his “cause” of death.
After I read the email from Aunt Peach,
I began to think about my other two male cousins, also “Baby Boomers”, who had
died in the past 8 years. My cousin
Steve died in October of 2000 in a motorcycle accident (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070302115657.htm)
at age 46 and then his brother Mark died at age 45 six months later from throat
cancer. Steve and Mark had good
professional jobs with good fringe benefits.
Both Steve and Mark were the only surviving children of my Uncle Russ,
leaving him childless and very alone in this world. A lovely man, it is a miracle that my Uncle
Russ has survived these strikes against his life.
Then my thoughts turned to all the
people - all “Baby Boomers”- that I knew had died. The list is so long that I had to think hard
to remember most of them! The first
people I thought of were my friends Steve and Shirley, a married couple that I
was good friends with since 1983. Steve
died of hepatitis (he was battling cancer) four years ago. He was 54.
Shirley died of a heart attack at 58 two years later. Ironically, she was in a hospital in Florida
being treated for a kidney infection when she just died.
Three of my four ex-husbands are
dead. Two of my old landlords who were
close personal friends are gone as well. All were Baby Boomers.
Although I lived in American Indian
communities most of my adult life, and thus American Indians have shorter life
spans (average of 45 years), I look around and I see that most of the people I
knew as an adult are dead. Sure, they
died from a variety of illnesses or “causes”, but these were people who never
reached their prime and these were people who lived in the world’s wealthiest
nation. Half of these people are white,
too, not just Indians. All were “Baby
Boomers”, born between 1946 and 1964.
BABY BOOMERS
After
American soldiers returned home from World War II in 1946, the United States
and other western countries experienced an explosion of births. This is where the name “Baby Boom”. This season of fertility continued for the
next 18 years, when the birth rate began to drop. In 1964, baby boomers
represented 40% of the population, which meant that more than one third of the
population was under 19 years of age at that time.
In the past
few years, Baby Boomers have been attacked by many groups, including regular
people, representatives of government and by the propaganda arm of the
“conservatives”; those thoughtless “think tanks” whose job is to create
“crises” and then offer laissez faire or “free market” economic solutions for
those “crises”. These solutions always
come with a blood cost for the regular villagers never benefit from these
“solutions” when the elite and corporations, on the other hand, prosper from the violent energies of western
capitalism.
There is a
plethora of articles on the internet raging against Baby Boomers, accusing them
of a “Me Generation”, that we were too shallow, materialistic and parasitic, or
that we are going to be a drain on good society in the future (for example,
“Boomers to Feast on Social Security” www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/
opinion/stories/2007/10/19/10192007wacrncol.html).
Mindless
think-tanks (they’re famous for “inventing” crises to effect draconian,
conservative social change) accuse us of “crimes” we will “commit” in the
future of “bankrupting” the government because Baby Boomers start will
collecting Social Security when they retire.
The costs to the System will more than bankrupt the government, these costs will force younger workers to pay
more taxes into the System. In other
words, Baby Boomers will become parasites to society only from the crime of
growing old.
There is a
reason why mindless, conservative “think tanks” sell these sensational tales:
their corporate donor masters want people to invest their Social Security taxes
in stocks. Now that wal-street is
starting to implode from all its avarice and thus, the economy is crumbling,
Social Security investment would have ruined many lives about to retire. It was always a bad idea to invest Social Security
taxes in the stock and money markets and will always be a bad idea, but the
lapdogs of wealth keep selling this idea.
You can find these articles of bad faith all over the internet,
including the Cato Institute. These
articles have sensational and hate baiting titles such as “The Democrats Want
to Raise Social Security Taxes” (http://www.socialsecurity.org/).
Right wing
politicians want to pour Social Security taxes into the market to make it flush
with wealth – wealth that can either earn a return or be lost forever because
of the volatility of the market. Ironic
that the big players always walk away rich from the market right before it goes
downhill when “average” investors are the suckers that lose money.
If Baby
Boomers aren’t being demonized by the media, politicians and others (including
think-tanks) for being the group that’s going to bankrupt government, Baby
Boomers are being demonized by those same people and groups for the futuristic
crime of bankrupting the government for future costs of elderly health care.
Individuals,
right wing talk show hosts, newspapers (financial and other), newscasts,
articles on the internet, so forth, hysterically scream that the needs
(including financial) of aging Baby Boomers will bring down the houses of
government and society because of the costs of future payments. These people, financial and political
representatives plus their agents (public relations firms, think tanks, so
forth) keep repeating the mantra and slogan over and over: Social Security and
Medicare are going to go bust because of the bothersome Baby Boomers.
Articles on
the internet and newscasts scream how sick Baby Boomers are going to get and
how much the public will have to pay for it:
• Smog
will hit baby boomers' hearts hard: report
(http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2006/07/31/smog-deaths.html)
Everyone
knows that smog kills people and those deaths are not reserved for just Baby
Boomers.
• 10 Million Baby Boomers Face
Alzheimer's, Report Predicts
Many
articles on the internet say that there are 70 million Baby Boomers still
alive. This means that one in seven Baby
Boomers will get Alzheimer’s Disease. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer)
has a chart that explains that 2 people per one thousand people, age 65-69 will
get Alzheimer’s Disease. Only when people are older than 90 does the rate of
disease go up (69 per one thousand people).
THIS RATE IS MUCH LOWER THAN THE RATE CITED BY THE INTERNET ARTICLE AND
SIMILAR ARTICLES.
• Diabetes Risk Grows for Baby
Boomers
This comes
from a 1987 article, thus proving the invisible, silent class war against Baby
Boomers began a long time ago. More,
diabetes has become an epidemic reaching virtually all segments of the population,
including Baby Boomers. Baby Boomers
aren’t the only ones stricken by this disease.
• Aging Baby Boomers Flocking
to Doctors (http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/healthmedical/a/aasickboomers.htm)
• Baby Boomers Appear to Be Less
Healthy Than Parents
•
Kidney
Disease Timebomb Ticking in Baby Boomers
• Researchers Relate Arthritis And
Obesity With Baby-Boomers
Articles on
the internet claim that large numbers of Baby Boomers will get alzheimers, back
problems, hearing loss, cancer and more.
Whether directly or indirectly, there are hidden messages in most of
these articles and those messages are that Baby Boomers will cost society and
government a lot of money for their medical ailments.
Instead of
fixing the problems proactively and humanely, the rabid capitalist element of
American society and government dominantly insist that the Boomers are the
problem, not their Savage System.
THE JUGGERNAUT
A
juggernaut is: “Something,
such as a belief or institution, that elicits blind and destructive devotion or
to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed.” (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=JUGGERNAUT)
There
is no money set aside in some bank account for Social Security payments or
Medicare. The money that people pay in
Social Security and Medicare taxes is lent to the United States government to
pay for its expenses including expensive wars.
Social Security and Medicare aren’t going broke: They’re already broke.
People
pay into Social Security and Medicare all their working lives. If they should die before they retire, all
that money is lost to the government.
The government and captains of capitalism only gain when people die off
at an early age before the people are eligible for their benefits. The government “saves” money when people die
because that it doesn’t have to pay out any benefits. Capitalists benefit, too, as they are safe
from higher taxes (which means more profits to the investor class).
It
is very fortuitous to the greed elements of society when Baby Boomers die
before they become financial “liabilities” to the System. Instead of celebrating the milestones of a
person’s life, the Savage Society finds Boomers millstones around their necks. This is because the elderly are not working,
thus not contributing to society. You
find this attitude and phenomenon in fascist societies. American capitalism is fascist and in that
mindset, those who do not contribute to society economically and/or
ideologically, must disappear permanently.
Unknown
to many, the Nazis got rid of their elderly population the “logical” way: They
had them killed either by doctors and nurses or by gas chambers in
concentration camps. The Nazis did this
with their own German handicapped and infirm as well. The aged, disabled, minorities and sick were
looked upon as “useless eaters” in German society and industry.
America
is an empire that certain people called neo cons want to cover the earth
with. The first law of empire is to kill
its redundant, independent, older and poor citizens. This frees up space, disappears critics and
enriches the wealthy because they don’t have to share.
Baby
Boomers lost a lot of wealth from the recent fallout of the mortgage
bubble. Worse, they lost a lot of wealth
in their homes.
Thus,
many Boomers are facing stark economic futures.
They have also
been
victims of layoffs because of their age and seniority (their jobs were
outsourced, destroyed, sent overseas or they were replaced with younger workers
without seniority so they would work for less).
My
boyfriend’s father is 54 and he’s facing being laid off from his job. This man has worked faithfully as an
electrician for a manufacturer for over 30 years and since this manufacturer
was taken over by a giant international corporation, someone has to pay the
costs so they are laying off workers with seniority and replacing them with
younger workers that won’t cost so much.
Work is this man’s life; what he’s lived for most of his life. Work is his lifeline and even if my boyfriend’s
father gets a nice financial package with his layoff, it will take years off
the man’s life because not having his job will put a big empty hole in his life
that he was not expecting. Plus it will
deny him the money he could have earned if he had not been laid off.
Ironically,
my boyfriend’s uncle (mother’s brother) committed suicide two years ago at the
age of 49. He killed himself because he
lost his job as a tiler and couldn’t find any work but burger flipping at
McDonald’s. It murdered his dignity to
work for wages he couldn’t support himself on so he put a noose around his
neck. And folks, this happened in
Holland where there are still social safety nets in place. The working situation for Baby Boomers in
America is worse…much worse.
Boomers
and older people are also getting poorer because they still have to pay part of
their doctor’s and hospital bills plus medicine costs. All of these costs have skyrocketed, thereby
depleting Boomers’ savings and income.
Many retired thought they had enough saved for the “golden years” have
found out that costs for prescriptions by themselves are putting them in the
poor house.
Baby
Boomers are a juggernaut: They have to be ruthlessly sacrificed for the benefit
of the elite and their System.
DEPRIVATION
Deprivation
means, “The act of depriving” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/deprivation)
or “The condition of
being deprived of what one once had or ought to have” (http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/deprivation)
There
are two kinds of Deprivation in sociological and psychological circles. One is Relative Deprivation and the other is
Critical Deprivation.
The
word “relative” means related. In some
scientific circles, relative deprivation is believed to be a phenomenon where
people feel deprived when they can’t keep up materially with others, including
their neighbors. But this is not the
exclusive meaning of relative deprivation, just one meaning and the meaning
social controllers and managers try to sell the public to minimalize, degrade
or hide its other meaning. Another
meaning for relative deprivation is when a person has the “basics” (enough to
eat, a place to sleep and possibly medical insurance), but doesn’t have the
other things that make life varied, different, unique, interesting and
valuable. These things include variety
in food to eat, hobbies, vacations, better choices of clothing, money for things
like art exhibits/theatre/movies/zoos/museum visits and all the other things of
life and civilization that add ambience, meaning and value to individuals’
lives.
Critical
relativity means a lack of food, housing and other basics of life.
Historically,
many older people in America have historically found themselves riding the
fence between critical deprivation and relative deprivation. This phenomenon is a structural problem of
the System. Either deprivation or a
combination of both deprivations is deadly because when people live in stark,
dark lives, they die!
They don’t
teach this in school and the media never covers it, but everyone in governing
circles or esoteric graduate school classes knows this: Take away someone’s
Quality of Life and they will die from deprivation or what I call “Adult
Failure to Thrive.”
Many people
are aware of the “infant failure to thrive”.
They know that infants who are neglected and not cuddled, talked to and
loved will begin to wither and die. This
is the same phenomenon for “Adult Failure to Thrive,” only some of the factors
for it are more advanced.
A Quality
of Life is different for many people, but it begins with decent food, decent
housing, medical care, some material comforts, recreation, hobbies, a yearly
vacation, money for essentials like clothes,
shoes to birthday presents, and all the other things that make life
healthy for an individual.
Deprive
people a Quality of Life and they start dying in droves. This is what I’ve observed all my life and I’m
(plus others) are observing it becoming more now.
“Americans
at the 95th income percentile or higher can expect to live nine years longer
than those at the 10th percentile or lower. The poor are more likely to develop
illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer, and there
is evidence that relative deprivation and the stress it engenders are involved.
When high inequality and rising top incomes shift society’s accepted standards
of living upward, it seems that people experience deprivation even when they
have adequate food, clothing, and shelter.”
The article
(“Unequal America”) where I get my above quote from also says, “The United
States no longer boasts anywhere near the world’s longest life expectancy. It
doesn’t even make the top 40… Research indicates that high inequality
reverberates through societies on multiple levels, correlating with, if not
causing, more crime, less happiness, poorer mental and physical health, less
racial harmony, and less civic and political participation.”
The “free
market” is not free. It is a very
violent and thus ruthless economic system that causes a wide gap between the
wealthy and the common man. The rich are
making off like the (legal) bandits they are whereas everyone else, including
the Baby Boomers, are becoming disempowered plus poorer financially and
socially.
The rich
and upper classes have their own retirement accounts and thus, it is in their
“best interest” not to support other classes with things like taxes for Social
Security and Medicare. Most of the elite
see recipients of any social safety nets as parasites, “stealing” away the
elite’s wealth by taxes to support these “useless eaters”. Again, the elite want to use the tax money
people pay into Social Security and Medicare for their wal-street ponzi schemes
that will mostly benefit bankers, stock brokers, hedge fund managers and other
elements of the established financial structures of America.
SOLVING THE BABY BOOMER AND SOCIAL
SECURITY PROBLEMS PERMANENTLY
The Baby
Boomers are dying off. That is my
observation from my personal experiences but it is the observation of others as
well. At the website “Baby Boomer Death
Counter Clock: Permanent Retirement (http://www.boomerdeathcounter.com/)
shows that
8.03300909% of USA Baby Boomers are dead.
It says that 69,766,596 USA Baby Boomers are still live. The site says that every 48.4 seconds another
Baby Boomer dies plus it says that 1,786.1 Baby Boomers died in the last 24
hours. The first two counters run
continuously, so the percentage of dead Baby Boomers and alive Boomers are
constantly changing. More, the site
says, “"the
big Boomer Die Off will accelerate around 2015 and the majority of boomers will
be dead by 2025." So much for the threat of Baby Boomers living to a
hundred years and thus costing “society” excess money!
There is a
sister site for Canada (http://www.boomerdeathcounter.com/canada.htm). The site’s continuous counters say that
4.18009914% Canadian Baby Boomers are dead and there are 8,507,433.987
alive. The minutes before the next
Canadian Boomer dies is 12.57 and the amount of Canadian Baby Boomers that died
in the last 24 hours was 114.55.
These
internet sites are alarming because they confirm what I and others have
observed: The Baby Boomers are dying out and other segments of the population
maybe dying out as well.
How
fortunate for the government and the elite.
POSTSCRIPT
On July 3rd,
six days before my birthday, I received two emails from two friends in
America. “Charlene” lives in central
Minnesota and “Bill” lives in Arizona.
She is 45 and he is 52. Both are
college educated (Charlene has two college degrees) and both have a great sense
of humor. I find it ironic and horrible
that both told me the same thing: That life had no more quality for them and
they were “waiting to die.”
Charlene is
still paying off student loans she accrued over tweny years ago with a salary
of $14,500 a year. She and her daughters
go hungry at the end of every month.
Bill is a
whistle blower and for that, he lost his businesses and family. He also ekes out a small living like
Charlene.
On the same
day I received the emails, the Labor Department reported
that 62,000 jobs were lost in June.
More, both April and May’s job losses were revised, taking their
combined job losses to 129,000, compared to an early estimate of 77,000 jobs
lost (http://www.financialweek.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080703/REG/960844336/1028/COMPENSATION).
The chances for Charlene, Bill and
other Baby Boomers to find better work are bleak. Although I don’t agree with them, I
understand why they are waiting to die.
As the saying goes, “Every time a
person dies, a library burns.” How tragic
for the world to lose all that potential only because someone is not seen as
profitable and/or a problem for western capitalism.
•••
I had a feeling to wait before I
contacted publishers about this article.
Sure enough, my intuition was right.
Since I wrote this article, new information has come out to support this
article.
On July 17th, two newspaper
articles appeared about American inequality in longevity and low standards of
well being. The first article, “American
inequality highlighted by 30-year gap in life expectancy (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-inequality-highlighted-by-30year-gap-in-life-expectancy-869736.html)
says, “…The
US finds itself ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in survival of
infants to age…. The report shows that although America is one of the richest
nations in the world, it is woefully behind when it comes to providing
opportunity and choices to all Americans to build a better life…"
The second
article, “Development:
US fails to measure up on 'human index'” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/17/internationalaidanddevelopment.usa)
says, “Despite
spending $230m (£115m) an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than
citizens of almost every other developed country.”
The
article continues, “"We get in this report ... an evaluation of what the
limitations of human development are in the US but also ... how the relative
place of America has been slipping in comparison with other countries over
recent years… "The Measure of America reveals huge gaps among some groups
in our country to access opportunity and reach their potential," said the
report's co-author, Sarah Burd-Sharps. "Some Americans are living anywhere
from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about:
health, education and standard of living."
On
July 25, an article titled “America’s forgotten poor” (http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=666&catID=17) says, “…There
are two Americas. There is the one of popular imagination and tourist
brochures, highlighting the extravagances of New York, San Francisco and Los
Angeles, the quiet wealth of New England and the showy opulence of Texas. But
there is also the US of itinerant Latino workers, poorly educated African
Americans without jobs, white farmers in the south unable to survive on a few
acres, ex-soldiers living in the streets. And lots of families struggling to
cope, with many parents holding down two or more jobs and still not earning
enough for food, clothes and housing…
All of these articles talk about
deprivation, whether critical or relative or a blend of both. And where you find deprivation, you find
human deaths that are attributed to something else. Like any other living thing, people don’t
grow or thrive in deprived situations.
