Word: riche
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Washington waged war on poverty among the elderly through two programs that helped rich and poor alike. Congress created Medicare insurance in 1965. In 1972 it voted a 20% increase in Social Security benefits and linked them to the Consumer Price Index in an attempt to safeguard retirees from the double- digit inflation that was devastating young families. In 1980 alone, payments increased a record 14.3%. Now each month 91% of those 65 and over receive benefits totaling $13.6 billion. The percentage of elderly people living below the poverty line has been cut from...
...deduction for Social Security tax and wonder if they will ever see that money again -- unless, of course, they visit Grandma. "This whole system just beats the hell out of me," says Paul, 27. "It's like that old saying: robbing from the poor to pay the rich...
Senior citizens deeply resent critics who seem to begrudge them their independence or imply that anyone ever got rich on a $500-a-month check. Many retirees worked hard, lived frugally and saved carefully to guard against the nightmare of a destitute old age. And while it is true the elderly consume roughly a third of the nation's medical resources, Medicare cannot begin to cover all the costs of a long illness. Already senior citizens pay three times as much out of their own pockets for health care as the young do. They view their benefits as a right...
Lapham, 53, speaks with some authority, since he has spent much of his life in nodding acquaintance with the rich. He grew up in a well-to-do, influential San Francisco family, and he attended schools (Hotchkiss, Yale) where mixing with the scions of wealth was hard to avoid. After choosing journalism as his life's work, he discovered that financiers, corporate chiefs and politicians were happy to let him trail along in their retinues. Lapham's background and his access to the mighty have given him a privileged perch from which to view the past few decades...
Bashing the rich has always made for rib-tickling entertainment, and this book is no exception. Lapham effectively ridicules the widespread notion that money is omnipotent and can make everything all right: "Given the current expectations among an increasingly rich and fastidious clientele it is entirely plausible to imagine a dissatisfied traveler to Florida bringing a lawsuit against the sun." But tireless denials of the infinite efficacy of wealth ultimately cost the author his sense of humor, and he begins to manifest the mania he condemns, in looking-glass fashion. The "civil religion" of unbridled capitalism makes everything awful...