Work 'Till You Die: The Bush Retirement Plan

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
June 16, 2005

Work 'Till You Die
Screwing Future Retirees...Again
By DAVE LINDORFF

While President Bush is still hustling his private investment account assault on Social Security, other conservative politicians, headed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), are attacking the retirement system and American workers from another direction. These faux "saviors" of the system are calling for a further raising of the retirement age, from the current 67, which is how old those born after 1960 already will have to be in order to retire, to 69.

.... while people are indeed living longer in America, they aren't necessarily staying healthy. Many of those who live long enough to collect a retirement check will by that time be crippled by strokes, heart conditions, joint ailments, cancers, etc.--often the result of working conditions they've been forced to put up with for years by their employers.

There is, let's face it, no logic or virtue in an economic system which, having produced the richest society in the history of the human race, now tells us we have to work harder and longer, instead of having more time to relax and enjoy our lives, or to do something creative and life-affirming.

As usual, the dominant conservative power structure has it backwards. It is wrong to be making Americans spend more hours per week and more years of their lives on the job. No one's saying that a person who wants to work should be forced out of a job, but we should be making it possible for people to retire earlier, not later-especially those who have the backbreaking or body-poisoning jobs that are threatening their chance to have a retirement at all.

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff06162005.html

[smirkymonkey]

1. The stress alone will kill us all before the current retirement

age of 65. Of course, knowing that we will be dead of stress before normal retirement age takes some of the pressure off. ;)