The war against the young
Je n’ai pas suivi ce dossier, je ne sais donc pas exactement de quoi il est question. Je ne sais que le prochain budget des Conservateurs devrait couper progressivement dans les pensions de vieillesse. Certains démontrent que ce ne serait pas vraiment d’un grand apport et qu’il existe d’autres chats à fouetter. Mais j’aime bien cette version des faits de Margaret Wente du Globe and Mail, avec laquelle il est possible de nuancer notre montée de lait. Une seule chose à y ajouter par contre : malgré le lobby, sa force, ne devrait-on pas, malgré tout s’en tenir qu’aux résultats, puisqu’au final c’est tout ce qui importe ? Oui, non ? C’est toujours mieux d’en savoir plus.
The biggest, most powerful and most dangerous lobby in the United States today isn’t the banking lobby or Big Pharma. It’s CARP’s big brother, AARP. No politician dares tangle with the seniors’ lobby. No one dares to question social security and Medicare (health care for seniors), even though these are the entitlements that threaten to keep the U.S. in hock to China forever. As economics writer RobertSamuelson has noted, there’s no path to a balanced budget without restraining retiree spending. And yet it’s strictly off-limits.
With the geezer population set to double, their entitlements will double, too – pensions, health care and all the rest. But it’s worse still because, thanks to modern medicine, people live forever. When the federal government introduced OAS in 1952, the qualifying age was 70 and many people didn’t live long enough to collect it. Today, it’s 65, and a Canadian of that age can expect to collect OAS for nearly 20 years. (…)
I am constantly astonished at the opposition parties’ stout defence of entitlements for people who demonstrably don’t need them. And I think anyone with a social conscience and a CARP membership should tear it up.
