I saw this article in my local paper. I think most conservatives would tell Mr. Hartley: a) he hasn’t prayed hard enough to Jesus to give him more strength to carry on until Hartley’s 70 (with lashing of junk about Jesus dragging the cross around…), or b) to get a “real job” ya slacker, c) shut up and drop dead, or d) let Harley eat cake.

Yet another example of the odd cosmic disconnect on the part of low-info conservatives. They profess to “hate” the elites, yet when a working class guy like Hartley explains his for-real situation, I’m sure most conservatives would just blow him off as a whining liberal trying to personally rip off “harder working” conservatives.

Good article, though, and it’s true.

I’ve had mostly desk jobs these last 25 years but even then, there’s a level of lifting and such (plus having moved for the job about 15 times over those years) and I feel it in my lower back all the time.

I can’t imagine actually doing the job Mr Hartley is doing and we’re the same age.

Mr. Hartley is part of the service economy. He’s not manufacturing something. That doesn’t mean he can’t be injured, or be afflicted with some form of repetitive stress disorder. Heck, you can get RSD typing on a keyboard all day.

While I view the idea of professional people, and others who choose to, working into their 70s as being a generally positive thing, that doesn’t mean that everyone is in that boat. Most of us aren’t professionals. For those people, work isn’t a part of who they are.

It’s not always a positive thing. Sen. Simpson needs to get better acquainted with the real world.

I think Simpson feels hes more aquainted with “the real world” than someone like mr Hartley. I would like to aquaint simpson with Mr Hartley’s world by stripping his congressional pension and health care benefits
(which we are paying for) from him. let him pay his own goddamn way if hes so worried about the goddamn deficit

Here in California all the public agencies are pushing 2tier retirement – it’s the latest craze following the non-money saving furlough craze of recent years.
Here’s what you get:
a cancerous workforce as the have lesses resent the full freighters;
a less productive workforce paying more for fewer benefits, that also limits an ability to hire younger fitter workers;
a desperate attempt by older workers to hang onto that jackhammer 5 more years;
skyrocketing workers compensation claims for increasing injuries;
public fury over injured workers “enjoying” workers comp benefits.
I worked in an industry that imposed 2tier in the early 80′s (due to the Bosky led mergers & acquistitions and arbitrage) and saw first hand that older, but highly productive employees were driven out prior to acheiving retirement age. The Lead Night Shift worker was moved to days and spent every dayworking the experess line. She lasted about 2 years and just short of retiring with full benefits.
I’m on my way to a Valley County to bargain a sucessor contract and the employer position (as we are seeing all over the State)is for increased contributions by employees (cost shifting) and 2tier for new hires. Neither saves money at least not in the short term, nor does it address retiree healthcare which is a cost-driver that neither party can continue to absorb (single-payer is the only answer).
This is simply a crime of opportunity.

Alan Simpson probably hasn’t had to lift much in the past several years..

I’m pretty sure Alan Simpson hasn’t had (what we mortals might call) a hard day in his whole life. I’d place him a couple notches below something I’d want to scrape off my shoe.

recall Dean Baker pointing out this 45% of our workforce working physically demanding jobs well in to seniorhood do not enjoy that 5-7 years of extended life the Cat Food Advocates tout – they average only another 2 years

oh, and another shock, a majority of them are to be found among the working poor

thanks David

America needs to LOWER the retirement age to 60 until the current Jobs Emergency ends, and we need to DOUBLE the benefits payout due to the Pensions Emergency we’ve been in since the 1980s.

It’s long past time to recognize that most Americans depend solely on Social Security for their retirement security, and that it needs to reflect that.

Double it; retire at 60.

Hartley is assembling tires. What part of ‘manufacturing’ is this job not?

The bottom line is this: These parasites who have lived off our tax dollars for years and are still doing so want to make workers who actually work do so longer while someone like Obama who serves the interests of the oligarchy that found and groomed him, will be basically retiring when he leaves office BEFORE the age of 60 with a full-funded government pension and health care benefits for himself and his family for the rest of their lives.

That is a fucking outrage.

Most people recognize that the warranty on our bodies can expire as early as the 40s… not for everyone, perhaps, but for enough people. That’s when the aches and pains might set in, when you need some help to read, and when your digestive system might go hay-wire on you.

Pushing the retirement age up to 70 is great for those guys in congress, who will never have to worry about it, since nearly all of them are millionaires, but what about the people who pay their salaries with their taxes? What about them?

Too many elite white men in power.

Even people working service sector jobs – such as retail, food service, and bank tellers – find it difficult to keep such jobs full-time as they age. Jobs requiring a lot of standing and/or stooping are also quite hard on your body, just in a way that’s different from this tire manufacturer worker’s example.

Our wealthy overlords – and I include here the millionaires in our fed gov’t – have no clue. Not one. Many are legacies that haven’t had to put in hard day’s work their entire lives. They’re full of you know what, but they’ve convinced conservatives – many of whom work like Hartley – that to demand better treatment is beyond the pale, socialism or worse.

Can’t be said often enough Teddy. It’s about time we quit making earnest arguments to hold onto a crappy status quo against full-blown assaults by asswipes like Simpson. We need to LOUDLY and FORCEFULLY push back with what we know reflects reality and will resonate with most of the population. Since the ’80s, business has made it absolutely clear that they want no responsibility for their employee’s retirement cashflow. They scammed everyone with 401Ks, an instrument that was never designed to be a complete replacement for a defined-benefits pension plan. Social Security is increasingly the only guaranteed stipend that the average worker can count on in retirement. It desperately needs to be upgraded to fulfill that role in a realistic way. When the Catfooders present their shit sandwich that we’re all supposed to take a bite out of, we need to shove it back into their faces and fight for the change that’s really needed.

DOUBLE IT; RETIRE AT 60.

Of course we should add, “assuming they can keep their jobs”. Companies are doing their best to keep grey hairs out of their workforces these days, a trend that will only increase given all the union-busting, pension fund decimation and corporate health care scamming afoot. Guys like Hartley are already getting scarce.

The conservatives and simpson have declared war on the working man but the republicans will say we are starting class warfare if we complain about it. And the really crazy thing is all those working people are about to put those assholes in office. I just saw a headline that the dems will not pass anything until the election fearing the voters will not like it. WTF? And after the election too I would imagine. The average person really must like Sarah and her friends.

Obama’s Death Panel

For some, the meager partial benefit at age 62 won’t be enough to live on, and they’ll stay in their laborious jobs. And don’t think for a second this won’t lead to workplace casualties.

I had no choice at 62 as I con no longer hold a job because of MRI contrast that has left me in constant pain & I didn’t qualify for disability… The system the way it is still sucks but to raise the age or any benefit cut would be outrageous!!

Double it; retire at 60.

Shit Teddy they should triple it if they really want to get the economy going… Just think if all seniors didn’t have to chose between food and their Meds…
Oh and remove the salary cap to pay for it… The Rich won’t even notice the few shekels more it costs them … Maybe one less $500.00 lunch or dinner..

Simpson and all the rest of the Catfood Commissars have never done anything close to working a job involving manual labor, unless it happened to be something in their college years to pay for beer or even perhaps tuition.

Simpson needs to be stripped of all his benefits which we pay for, if he’s got investment income or something, perhaps he can live on that or even Social Security (irony is only comatose, just on serious life support).

As someone up-thread pointed out, Obama is set for life no matter how the Catfood Commission proposal comes out. Fuck, I hate these assholes.

Two wars on the Big Government Credit Card and now Seniors have to pay it off with their lives. Fuck politicians, every one of them.

Somebody might want to find and post a link to the C-Span program I saw this weekend of a pro-Social Security conference hosted by some DC think tank. Had speakers from SS Works, SS Matters, Darcy Burner from some progressive org, etc.

Some good stuff.

And not just workplace casualties to older workers, but to the younger workers around them who have to contend with whatever added dangers arise from working with people who can’t really pull their weight, anymore. I’m 67 and, believe me, there are jobs I would have taken a shot at when I was younger that I wouldn’t give a moment to now. Can’t do it. Turned down a great offer earlier this year because it was physically beyond me. It was ironic: when I was younger, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to accept and now I have complete confidence and not the physicality. Hey, life takes some funny turns.

The people who are proposing SS cuts simply don’t care about SS, they don’t need it. Just as the elitist ideologues pushing Race to the Top likely don’t send their children to public schools. We used to call them snotty and stuck on themselves. Is that usage still around?

And where the hell does Obama get off holding these Death Panels in secret? This is all our money.
If conservatives want to impeach him for whatever crazy reason, I’ll go along with it. Better yet, let’s join jeffroby and start a robust Dump Obama campaign from the left side of the spectrum. If this isn’t the final straw, what is?

For 3 generations industries (government bureaucracies adopted these atrocious HR practices as well) have been working employees to death, involuntarily retiring workers in their 40s concomitant with a whole lot of careful “labor force engineering” including forced off-shoring, exclusive off-shore hiring, gender/age/experience discrimination and benefits rip-offs while the worsening environmental toxicity and increasingly poisoned food supply lowers the effective American life span toward age 50:

Summing up the findings of the report, co-author Sarah Burd-Sharps writes, “Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living.” While the US remains one of the richest nations in the world, it is “woefully behind when it comes to providing opportunity and choices to all Americans to build a better life.

- from ‘“Measure of America” report documents social decay of the United States,” July 2008

The insurance industry– which has always kept a real-time accessible data vault of at least a 11-year rolling window of actuarial data on every American– has long known these realities but it wasn’t until recently that anyone else had the guts to come out and publish the composite findings (after the fact of the very apparent reality to the majority of us all).

So, just as a thought experiment, take “his two-part quiz to determine your “Human Development Sensitivity Index”:

The Measure of America Quiz

Next, go read the landmark “The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009″ and the reports going forward (more details here).

Hence, I say “double it,” but in the beginning, make it “retire at 45″ to play catch-up (e.g. grandfathering those whose jobs permanently left for India, Vietnam and China in the late 1990s) until the US restores quality employment and employment for the majority of its citizens against the aforementioned Human Development Indices. Once these indices are achieved with a stability in the US, then change the “retire at 45″ to “retire at 60.” Meanwhile, I know too many people who were systematically ripped-off being good workers, got hit by the The Great Heist of 2008 and, as a result, are sick or disabled and don’t have a prayer of any help from this joke of an American social safety net. They will simply not make it if we implement a “double it; retire at 60″ policy. If we do a “double it; retire 60″ policy, it will have to have one heck of a bridging/transition program.

It isn’t only or even mainly conservatives who are necessarily pushing raising the retirement age, the Urban Institute referenced in the NYT article as advocating raising the retirement age is a liberal organization, and many of the members of the Catfood Commission that are advocating raising it are former Clinton administration officials.

I generally agree with FDL, but you’re all missing the point.

A higher retirement age is only a “hardship” for those that depend upon Social Security.

In other words, the elephant in the room here is the fact that people who DON’T need Social Security get benefits regardless. It’s scandalous really how a large number of feckless baby boomers have come to view their federal wage insurance, as an ancillary income stream to piss away on vacations and mindless mass-consumption.

The solution to the long-term SSI insolvency issue is obvious: means -testing. There is absolutely no legitimate reason why someone who doesn’t need benefits should be getting them. The fact that the federal government will send a check to a 70-year old millionaire in great health over an unfortunate 60 year-old in terrible shape through no fault of his own is honestly an outrage.

But Democrats refuse to embrace this inconvenient truth, because political strategists have come to view this ridiculous situation as a perk. Like the stealth bomber with parts built from all 50 states, the fact that everyone is a beneficiary, regardless of need, insulates Social Security from spending cuts–never mind how wasteful or counter-productive it is. It is a loser’s strategy; a “third-way” politician’s dream of superficially appeasing the left without actually having to do anything at all.

I think this position sorely needs re-evaluating, and I hope that the FDL community can look past the knee-jerk, inflammatory “catfood” rhetoric to see the difference between benefit-cuts and means-testing.

…advocating raising it are former Clinton administration officials.

That presupposes the Clinton admin was filled with liberals

It was not.

means -testing. There is absolutely no legitimate reason why someone who doesn’t need benefits should be getting them.

Means testing for Social Security is the absolute quickest way to have it destroyed completely as it then becomes a “welfare” program

Meanwhile, Iraq is running surpluses, courtesy of Bush. they also have universal health care courtesy of Bush.
And Americans will be in the soup lines IF they can recite bible verses for their gruel. What a deal!

Iraq Posting Massive Surplus Thanks To U.S. Taxpayers

One would almost think our leaders hate us……

The brilliance of the Republicans and the con artists like Beck, is that they know which buttons to push on the low information voters to make them actively work against their own interests, and that would be things like gun rights, or abortion or just wrapping everything up in biblical passages.

The religious mindset is often willful ignorance anyway and these folks are easily manipulated and twisted with the rhetoric of God and Country.

The REAL information and consequences of the things these people support get drowned out in that noise.

So the religious fundamentalist and in particular “single issue voter” will eat a pile of crap as long as it’s served on the right platter.

And they’ll thank you for it.

Yes, there is. If people have no stake, they will be persuaded that SS is welfare, the dole, for the undeserving poor and will be lead to cut it off. One of the men who fashioned SS under FDR made the comment that a program for the poor soon becomes a poor program. I used to think as you did, but when I read that article, I realized that government has to account for human psychology and that aspect absolutely necessitates ensuring that as many people as possible have personal stakes. (I was going to write investments but I didn’t want any conflation with market investments.)

Isn’t Simpson from a wealthy family?

These guys think the hard day on the tennis court, or in Mr. Obama’s case the basketball court, is the same thing as working in logging, or fishing, or pretty much any manufacturing job. They don’t understand that their “game” fatigue is something they can chose to do or not do, but for a worker, if you don’t show up you a) don’t get paid b) lose your job.

Than what were they? Liberals are opposed to BOTH government involvement/ regulation of personal private matters AND government regulation of the economy. Perhaps you are one of those who uses “liberal” to mean “progressive” or “social democrat”, but in every place and time but the USA for the past half-century liberal is understood to be the way I defined it, and I can assure you that is what Rubin and his disciples are. Liberals are the enemy of the left.

That’s why I call myself a leftist. Liberals, generally, don’t like leftists. I tend to think that’s what Gibbs was getting at when he said the “professional left.”

the rich and near-rich, such as Simpson and most Congresspeople (House and Senate) do not represent, nor empathize with, the struggles of everyday seniors and near-seniors.

Electoral politics is terminally corrupt.

This feckless baby boomer has been paying into the Social Security insurance plan for over 40 years…

I guess if it is means tested, it’s not worth a nickel more than paying into an AIG annuity?

gee… who coulda thought there might be a comparison? I guess I should have to sell my house to afford my Medicare supplemental insurance?

Many Senators work into their 80′s, why can’t everyone else. If you see something wrong here, retire the SOB’s immediately.

One story I love is from a course I took around 1990, in which a professor of mine from Peru said in class that “Latin Americans are opposed to Reagan’s liberal policies” which produced much head scratching until someone held up his hand and said “But Reagan isn’t a liberal, he’s a conservative.” The meaning of liberal is completely different everywhere else, much closer to the classical meaning of Adam Smith and John Locke. I generally describe myself as on the far left in a mixed audience, a radical in a bit more sophisticated audience and a Marxist to those who should know what that means.

I was talking to the dairy guy at Kroger last week,the same one I have spoken to for years {Ron}and found out, when I asked him about his upcoming retirement he now [thanks to new concessions}has to work an additional 10 years.He and other co workers due to retire this year missed out ,some a mere 2 weeks. The rules changed in mid stream.He now will have to work 50 years[50 YEARS}to receive the benefits promised when he joined the union. Ron has been working in the cold ,lifting pounds of dairy,all hours, week day and Sat.And Sun.Ron will be 66 if he can do his job that long.As a former nurse with a lot of spine injuries {from lifting,turning,caring for patients without help , I know what these people are going through.They Need HELP.Ron and his fellow workers need our assistance.Is there a politician anywhere that has any idea of what real people do to support their families?<

Oops. Don’t know how I read the place of work wrong, other than being in a hurry. Yes, it’s manufacturing.

People do similar work in tire shops, which is what I thought I read he was doing.

Assuming many can even handle manual labor into their seventies, the problem is that most will be let go when unable to perform their work and will be unable to find any other employment.

It’s really not the decision for most blue collar workers to even stay working in most cases.