Vol. 79/No. 38      October 26, 2015

For men in the top 20 percent by income, life expectancy rose by 7.1 years, to nearly 89 years, for those born in 1960 compared to those born in 1930. Over the same period it fell for the 20 percent of men with the lowest wages, to 76 years — a 13-year gap. There is a similar, but smaller, differential for women.

As a result, those with the highest incomes collect significantly more in Social Security benefits over a lifetime, the report’s authors conclude.

“We are spending the most money for the longest periods to protect people who need the least protection,” economist Robert Samuelson commented on the study in the Washington Post Sept. 27. Pitting the young against the old, he added, “We are penalizing the future to pay for the past.”

His answer? Make workers wait longer to collect Social Security, and cut benefits for those at the top.

This isn’t a new idea. Democratic and Republican legislators have been chipping away at Social Security for decades, including raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67, increasing payroll taxes and periodically issuing warnings that funds will soon run out.

Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes presents an opposite view in the book Capitalism’s World Disorder. The capitalist crisis today is not “primarily an economic crisis,” he wrote in 1993. “It is the great political and moral crisis of our time.”

“Social Security was an initial step by our class — by those who produce wealth — toward conquering the social organization of conditions necessary for life, such as education and health care, for a lifetime,” he continued.

The Social Security Act was adopted in 1935, a concession by the capitalist rulers in response to increased working-class struggles spearheading a rising industrial union movement during the Depression years. Out of the Black rights battles of the 1950s and early ’60s, the working class won its extension to include Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for workers with low incomes.

When the bosses’ economists and pundits start making coldly actuarial arguments to turn Social Security from an entitlement into a means-tested charity, it’s an attack on the solidarity and unity of the working class. It undermines the fight to establish a universal social wage as a right for all — regardless of class or income.

“Workers think of each other in terms of a lifetime. We cannot think of each other the way capitalists think of us. We cannot make ourselves think of other human beings as though they do not exist up to the age of thirteen or after the age of sixty-five,” Barnes said. “We have a different class view, a different moral view of society.”  
 
 
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