American political culture is upside down. Money flows to the old; the young are starved.
We spend lavishly on the most unproductive segment of the population and don’t invest in the vitality of youth and the future. For example, last month, Medicare spent $29,000 in two weeks on hospital bills and doctors to nurse my 89 year old mother-in-law back to a semblance of living — [Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. John Mellencamp]. If a young person asked for a similar handout to pay for a year of college, he or she would be flatly denied. Notwithstanding, my mother-in-law is a millionaire and easily could have paid her bill in cash.
The oppression of the young continued in Congress during the same two weeks my mother-on-law stayed in the hospital. Congress refused to extend subsidized student loans at 3.4% per annum threatening to increase them to 6.8%. Some student loans carry interest rates as high as 7.9%, a huge premium to the risk-free rate of 1.67%.
Congress refuses to act on principle. The Tea Party Caucus run by Michele Bachman wants to cut $6 billion to offset the student loan subsidy. If Congress took Medicare away from millionaires that would probably do the trick, but even the Tea Party would not dare propose such an offset because it too is controlled by the old.
The power of the old comes from the ballot box. Old people vote more than young people. Their influence is especially important in primaries where candidates are chosen by the political parties. Whereas 80%+ of the people over 70 will vote in a primary – probably because they have nothing else to do – only 5% of twenty year olds vote in primaries. Twenty year olds will tell you that their apathy is caused by disenchantment with the candidates, but I think it is because they are too busy creating a life for themselves to focus on politics. Politics is increasingly the vocation of the old and angry.
One solution is to offer age weighed voting — to do away with one man / one vote. Essentially, young people’s votes would be given more weight. For example, a twenty year old would get 20 votes and an eighty year would only get one. That would level the playing field and cause politicians to cater to the young. For it is the young who will have to live with the decisions being made by the politicians.
The other way to close the age gap is to recapture excess social security and Medicare entitlements through death taxes, euphemistically inheritance taxes. At death, the old person would have to pay back the difference between what they put into social security / Medicare and what they took out — if they died with an estate after funeral expenses. As Senator Coburn said on John Stewart’s and Steve Colbert’s shows, “The average American family will pay $100,000 into Medicare and take out $360,000.” The same ratio appears to be true of social security. I am not for double taxing inheritance, but I think that taxpayers should be reimbursed for an excess ‘safety net’ from the deceased estate.
Finally, guaranteed, free public education should be extended through college and graduate school. Getting young adults in debt should not be the goal of our society. Kids should be sponsored, not indentured. The old know in their hearts that they are taking too big a slice of the American pie; it is time to shift more of the country’s enormous wealth to the young.