Martin O'Malley's Plan for Dignity in the Golden Years

 

            There’s a lot to like in presidential candidate Martin O’Malley’s (D-MD) new plan for addressing the economic issues confronting the massive Baby Boom generation as it prepares to leave the labor force. Released under the headline “Expanding Social Security So Americans Can Retire With Dignity,” O’Malley’s plan touches all of the bases.

            O’Malley shoves back against Republicans who want to cut Social Security by privatizing it, means testing beneficiaries, using less generous cost of living adjustments and raising the retirement age.  O’Malley agrees with me that Social Security is not facing a crisis and that Republican claims that it is are “nothing more than misguided attempts to score political points at retiree’s expense.”

            Instead, he insists that Social Security benefits must be sufficient to keep retirees out of poverty.  To address the widening gap between rich and poor and the fact that a large percentage of Americans do not have sufficient savings to retire with dignity, he wants to increase benefits for lower and middle-income workers.  He would pay for his plan by lifting the cap on wages subject to the Social Security tax for workers earning more than $250,000 per year.

            But O’Malley’s plan is much more than a rousing defense of Social Security. He wants to address a number of other issues that affect the financial security of the elderly.  He wants to work with the private sector to “develop an efficient, affordable, and high-quality system to provide a diverse range of long-term care services” for seniors.  He wants to crack down on “unscrupulous lenders and scam artists” who “attempt to separate seniors from their lifelong earnings.”  And he wants to make it easier for people to save for retirement by requiring employers to “process an automatic employee contribution to an IRA . . . at a level determined by the employee (who would have the option to opt out).”

            Behind this plan is O’Malley’s clear-eyed understanding of why so many Americans have so little saved for retirement. “Millions of hardworking Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck,” he observes, and they often can’t afford to put anything aside for their “golden years.”  That is a wage problem, says O’Malley, and that is why support for a significant increase in the minimum wage and other policies that lead to higher pay for workers is “critical to ensuring that today’s workers can retire with dignity and security in the future.”

            The problem with the O’Malley plan, a problem I suspect it will share with all plans offered by both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, is that it never comes to terms with the fact that not everyone agrees on what the “golden years” are and should be.

            When President Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law 80 years ago, the world was a vastly different place.  Lifespans were shorter and work often involved a significant physical component for a sustained period of time.  After 30 or 40 years of toil, bodies were spent.  They simply couldn’t keep up, first with younger bodies seeking work and then later with the machines that ultimately replaced most of those bodies.  People retired because they had to, and Social Security guaranteed that those people would have some sort of an income during the few years remaining to them between retirement and the grave.

            There is still a sizable number of people who cannot work beyond their early 60s.  They no longer have the strength or they may have suffered a debilitating disease or accident.  There are also people who don’t have the training and are too old to retrain themselves for information-age careers.  The rules of the game changed on these people and they need to be cared for.

            But there are other people, often highly educated and capable of retraining, who aren’t looking forward to sitting on the porch and enduring endless rounds of golf for the quarter-century of life still allotted to them after age 65.  They may want to slow down, but they may also want to continue working, both because they want and need the income, and because they find that using their skills in the working world is satisfying and fulfilling.

            O’Malley is right to style this a discussion about human dignity.  That is why it is entirely appropriate to include in the discussion some attention to increasing wages, long-term care and the abuse of seniors by the unscrupulous.  All that is missing is a plank addressing the subtle age discrimination older workers face in finding and keeping meaningful permanent employment.

            The O’Malley plan is far more than the simple-minded discussions about raising the retirement age or keeping Social Security in actuarial balance that the Republicans seem to want to have.  It is, instead, a chance to begin a discussion about what we have a right to expect our country to do for us at every stage of our lives, what we should be willing to do for ourselves and what we should be willing to pay for it.  But that discussion can only make sense as part of a new social contract that defines what it means to be an American in the 21^st century.