Bad Crow Review: Work! Good God Y'all
What is it good for?
Links, if any, are at the end.
Yr. editors were engaged in long hours of intermittently physical labor this weekend, with age, unfamiliarity and bodily disrepair resulting in a zombie-like condition during off hours; hence the lack of posts from Friday on. We beg your indulgence.
The continuing erosion of the Social Security eligibility age is especially brutal for people who labor for a living. The theory behind the increases is that people live longer and healthier lives and can retire later than in the days when the graduated pension was established, while still enjoying their benefits for an equivalent number of years. The delayed payments ideally will keep the program solvent for the yoot.
The increase in life span is not uniformly distributed, though, especially in recent years. People of means whose labor puts less of a strain on their bodies live longer than lower-income people whose bodily infrastructure is under constant attack. (There are exceptions, of course.) Deaths by suicide, overdose and Covid have eroded even further an already-low (by wealthy nation standards) life span among the U.S. working class.
Non-union laborers, which is most of them, get paid less and ordinarily get no paid sick days or retirement benefits from their jobs. If they survive to age 67 (now; it’ll inevitably go up) they can look forward to relatively low Social Security benefits, and a shorter retirement during which to enjoy them.
The death rate among people without bachelor’s degrees has more or less tripled since 1992 in the age groups between 25 and 59 years old. For instance, the death rate among 25-year-olds was 23/100,000 in 1992 and 100/100,000 in 2017; among 59-year-olds, the rate was 39/100,000 in 1992, and 103/100,000 in 2017.1
Obviously those data precede the pandemic, which dropped the average life span among the working class yet more;2 they were more likely than most others to be designated “essential workers,” hence suffering more exposure to the disease than anyone other than medical workers, with the attendant higher risk of death and long Covid.
Government policies and the lack of them are entirely implicated in the diseases of despair shortening pre-Covid working class life.
This is all to say that Social Security benefits should be increased — and the minimum raised to a decent level — and the retirement age should be lowered. Nobody in this country, working or otherwise, should be impoverished, and that they are is, again, a policy decision.
Tom Verlaine with “Flash Light,” a pretty good solo album from the erstwhile Television front man.
That, comrades, is all we got. Take care, be well.
There's some discussion about all of that going on over at AngryBear. You might be interested.