05 May 2011

Should we let granny starve?

When someone starts talking about whether we should reform social security, medicaid and/or medicare; we always hear about the doom and gloom of how grandpa and grandma are going to die, starving, in the dark.

Let me point out something that I don't think I have seen yet.  I've been aware that those entitlement programs have been doomed to bankruptcy for decades.  Since the early eighties at least.  That means that people getting ready to enter the system today were in their mid to late thirties.  That's more than enough time to set up something that ensured that they wouldn't die starving in the dark.  The information was out there and obvious enough that I, a high school student at the time, noticed.

Grandpa and Grandma essentially have chosen to fuck us because they couldn't be bothered to plan ahead against this eventuality.

So I say, fuck them!  Let them starve.  Let them die of easily curable diseases.  The chance to avoid this mess was in their hands before I even got a chance to vote, they chose to make this bed, let them lie in it!

If a particular grandparent is near and dear to you, clean out the spare bedroom and move them in.  It's not my problem that your parents/grandparents didn't plan ahead.  I deeply resent that I am likely not going to be able to make such plans myself as their decisions from thirty years ago consume all of the funds that I would have used to make a retirement account.

Grandma and Grandpa don't care if I starve in the dark, why should I care if they do?  Letting them starve now means I don't starve later.

Never make me choose between me and you.  I pick you every time.

2 comments:

  1. Aren't these the same grandparents that always told us what was best for us and how we should handle our lives?

    ReplyDelete
  2. In his nonfiction writing about his time in politics, Robert Heinlein (pbuh) commented that many old people (not all, but a good percentage) had basically, this thought: Either to collect more money from the government per month than they had ever earned, and to hell with everybody else, or to continue collecting rents/dividends/whatever, and to hell with everybody else.

    ReplyDelete

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