Saint Guinefort
Verified User
You are exactly right. My husband spent his entire working career in IT with the same company. He planned to retire at age 60 or so. Three years before that could happen, he and several other long-time employees were laid off. They were replaced with H1B visa workers from India, who were paid far less and who received few benefits. As an incentive not to sue the company (a large national insurance company), they were offered six months salary and two years' health insurance if they would sign an agreement not to sue for age discrimination. They all accepted. We were more fortunate than many people in the same situation, including some of his former coworkers. He walked out CIGNA's door and right into a better-paying IT position with another company. We used the severance to pay off the house, he retired at age 60, and we moved up here.
Imagine though if you were a person with a physical type job like construction, nursing, electrician, police officer, assembly line, etc. who found working more and more physically difficult as you aged. You plan to retire as soon as possible because your body is failing you. But the Republicans took away social security and put your retirement benefits in the market, which was way down by the time you planned to hang it up. What then? My guess is that you'd see a large number of new applications for social security disability, assuming, that is that the Republicans hadn't destroyed that as well.
I have yet to understand why the party that normally appeals more to the older American (GOP) would make so much noise about eliminating or limiting Social Security. I get that they want to shift everything over to the "free market" where someone else can make some scratch off of it rather than having it "help" people, but why would they needlessly antagonize the only voting base they can usually count on is beyond me.
But corporate America already offloaded their pension obligations in preference to 401k's and forcing everyone into the "stock market" so that they could bankroll the finance folks to play fun "games" with the money and occasionally crater the economy, so I guess telling Americans that we are OFFICIALLY back in the "Gilded Age" is how the whole game plays out.