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Stoutly middle-aged and independently wealthy David Brooks thinks that "oldsters" and "geezers" should volunteer to make life more plentiful for their children and grandchildren. What’s not to like? For starters, his prescription that they give up claims to a better and healthier retirement in order to pay for it (so as to ease the tax burden on the wealthy and their corporations).
The already retired have paid Social Security and Medicare taxes their whole lives, on top of state and federal income taxes, and probably contributed to a private pension (assuming they were lucky and that pension wasn’t gutted by a "strategic" corporate bankruptcy). They’ve also seen house prices and the value of savings and 401(k) plans dwindle, while out-of-pocket costs escalate. Which makes Mr. Brooks’ prescription the equivalent of asking that they pay twice and get little or nothing in return.
The billionaires who back him, his party and his employer’s media competitors wouldn’t think of giving up a bargain they’d paid for in order to feel good about it, let alone to help someone else. But none of that reality schtick for Mr. Brooks. He is comfortable selling his patent medicine, in part, because he knows his advice won’t be acted upon. Its purpose is to enliven the GOP base and to help pit the elderly and the young against each other.
Bobo wraps his argument with references to Shakespeare and the jargon of "developmental psychology" and by quoting Sigmund Freud on the claimed inability to teach old dogs (and humans) new tricks. He sets his straw men alight by claiming that "new knowledge" tells us not all geezers yell at their neighbors to get off their damn lawn. They can, in fact, learn and lead, and they ought to lead the effort to sacrifice their own hard-earned interests, accumulated in a vastly different political world, in order to give their children a leg up.
Bobo’s near suburb of Metro DC must have a lot Dick Cheneys and Antonin Scalias living in it, but not many grown children living with their parents because they’ve been out of work for 30 months, nor many parents who’ve moved in with their dual income, no kids children because they’re still working at 70, but Walmart wages won’t pay the rent. Bobo eschews that kind of reality, which he could easily find by driving a dozen miles or so farther out of DC or, heaven forfend, driving into SE or NE DC itself. Bobo, instead, stays well within his self-invented Never Land with descriptions like this:
The research paints a comforting picture. And the nicest part is that virtue is rewarded. One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations.
All of which is prelude to his claim that "we" are now practicing "reverse generativity", spending more on the elderly than on the young and "productive" by a ratio of 7:1. Wow, gotta love those statistics devoid of context. (I just know the model of this speech sounded better in the original German.)
Spontaneous social movements can make the unthinkable thinkable, and they can do it quickly. It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generativity revolution — millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.
It may seem unrealistic — to expect a generation to organize around the cause of nonselfishness. But in the private sphere, you see it every day. Old people now have the time, the energy and, with the Internet, the tools to organize.
The elderly. They are our future.
Mr. Brooks has lifted a talk that a fictional Wall Street trusts & estates lawyer once made to a group of over-65′s living in Miami Beach, on Park Avenue and in Aspen, and twisted it into an argument that middle Americans should forego their retirement security on the off chance that a beneficent government would use the same tax revenues to help make life better for their children. How that would happen or through what, no doubt, private capital intermediary – like Goldman Sachs or the former employers of all those oldsters which have since sent their jobs to China – Mr. Brooks never says. He just delights in his own performance, like Winston Smith after a happy day at work at the Ministry of Truth.
In truth, Mr. Brooks’ prescription should be as comforting to America’s elderly as the soothing words spoken to Hansel and Gretel by that kind, if hungry, woman living in the gingerbread house.
9 Comments
What a stupid little fuck. Bobo, that is, not the Earl.
Sadly, Bobo echos the views of Villagers and a lot of “made men”. He would rather the already retired give up their meager security in order to avoid politically tough choices over what defense spending to give up or clean up, what overdue and unpaid corporate taxes there are to collect, what to do after Bush’s exorbitant tax giveaways to the wealthy expire, and whether to tax hedge fund managers and unearned passive income (capital gains) at the same rate as earned income.
Each of those suggestions alone would do wonders to add to government revenues, needed to pay for essential programs. Altogether, they would solve a lot of problems for the country, even if they make a few for the corporate world and a few hundred ueber-wealthy families. The latter would still benefit enormously by reinvesting in the social structures and middle and working classes that make-up the society they claim to rule.
Bobo’s propaganda is never without art. Here, he pulls family heart strings instead of the suspenders of the wealthy. He panders to the religious left and right’s traditions of self-righteousness, sacrifice and group solidarity rather than expose the group solidarity of the ueber-wealthy and the corporate lobbyists who pull the suspenders of Congresscritters. That Mr. Brooks appears to do so effortlessly and without scruple makes one wonder why the Times keeps giving him and Ross Douthat such prominent OpEd space.
Okay, Bobo. You first. Clear out your 401k and give all the money to a food bank. Sell your house and give the money to a free clinic. After clearing out all of your current assets, commit to give enough of future income to a homeless shelter that you will live out your years at 60% of the poverty level.
Then try writing a column about it after a year of eating scraps.
Thanks, Earl. I usually try to stay away from Bobo.
I like your idea. Bobo reportedly makes seven figures writing for the Times. That would leave him rather a large amount to donate to futurekind and still live reasonably well. I hear that rooming houses near Logan Circle are a bit cheaper than his suburban pad in Metro DC.
Bobo usually writes in order to stir people to inaction. As he does here, he puts the week’s events and themes into comfortable nonsense for the GOP base.
As digby complains, refuting the likes of Douthat and Brooks takes up a lot of energy that would be better spent constructing things, like coalitions, networks, elections and policies. But ignoring Bobo is to ignore his patrons, and that would be dangerous.
I actually read that column. I feel so dirty.
ROFLMAO
You succeeded!
I can’t read Brooks anymore. It is not just that seniors paid FICA. It is that they overpaid into Social Security. This is where the Social Security surpluses come in and give us what is the subtext to Brooks’ piece. Those surpluses were transferred from Social Security into general revenues and spent. All the Social Security Administration has to show for them is a stack of IOUs and phantom interest on them. In 2017 or likely earlier given the bad state of the economy, the surpluses going into Social Security and from there into general revenues run out. What comes in through the FICA won’t fully cover benefits. At this point, Social Security will start asking for its money back. This means either taking money out of general revenues or increasing the deficits and converting these IOUs from intra-governmentally held debt to publicly held debt. Now put simply the corporatist parties of Democrats and Republicans don’t want to do this. They want money for their wars and for the corps.
So we get Obama and Orszag on the one side warning about the dangers of increasing entitlements, and on the other we have rightwing propagandists like Brooks talking up elder sacrifice. And yes it is as funny as it is hypocritical that Brooks would be asking others to make sacrifices when he has never had to sacrifice for anyone or anything and has no intention of ever doing so. But the important point here is that Democrats and Republicans have the same message. They want to welch on their commitments to Social Security (and Medicare too) and they want to blame their bad faith on their victims, those greedy old folks.
Bobo’s theme is an unoriginal if chutzpahed version of class war. Take away benefits people have saved for via taxes, homes and small investments, then pit the elderly against the young who don’t want to pay for one more group’s “mistakes” (an Orwellian version of that term), nor do they want the same lost bargain to happen to them. It is propaganda dolled up in literary allusions that keeps 95% of Americans looking at each other with resentment instead of at those who have taken their money and broken their promises. This will not end well.
Bobo is a messenger, not a principal. He’s the canary in the Robber Baron’s coal shaft. The point he makes is a brutally selfish and anti-social Randian one: He and his patrons should keep all their income (screw taxes and government payments except to his patron’s corporations), but expand government and take a bigger share of its expenditures to increase their own wealth, while denying government a role in benefiting those who do pay taxes and make America productive. To Bobo and his patrons, those who acted collectively and pooled their resources against a time when they would have fewer of them or in order to obtain goals achievable only by acting together are fools.
Bobo is an apologist for Robber Barons. For them, might makes right because economic might is the tool they have. If they can corrupt government with it, make it do their bidding and prevent it from doing others’ (while taking their taxes), they deserve it. Success is its own reward. The cynicism, however Bobo couches it in allusions to Shakespeare and Freud, is of Rovian proportions.
Brooks is selling the same thing the Democrats are selling. The “bargain” they offer is that in order to promote “Democratic” interests, Democrats should give up what they’ve worked generations to achieve (choice, social legislation, savings, a career’s worth of tax payments as half a bargain). They should then ask the Republicans pretty please for a little help to replace those achievements with whatever Republicans will accept. They won’t help or accept anything.
Democrats know that, which means they don’t want to govern either. They want to stay in office, but do nothing except promise something that they might deliver sometime after the next election – a lost horizon when to a politician “tomorrow” is an eternity.
I think we should start a campaign to get him fired from every job he has including the New York Times. His column was the most insulting thing I have ever read. I worked for 34 years for a large corporation and was laid off last year (along with lots of others my age… but they claim there is no age discrimination). So here I am in my late 50′s, I did all the right things, went to college, saved money, bought a house, and NOW THAT I CAN’T GET A JOB, I have been forced to use my 401k money to survive. That wasn’t the plan, the 401k was supposed to be for when I retired. And now BOBO wants to take my social security too? After I paid into it for over 45 years (I had other jobs before the corporate one). He can rot in Hell. Write everyone he works for and tell them you are boycotting him until he is fired. Let him see how it feels to be kicked to the curb and then have other opinionated boobs like BOBO kick you while you are down.