“Older Investors Getting Burned” — AOL news hilite today. This past Saturday, August 28th, I denounced Republican efforts to destroy Social Security as we know it and substitute millions of individual investment accounts. I pointed out the dangers of the stock market and warned that people who could least afford it, the elderly, could lose their shirts. I didn’t know that four days earlier The New York Times had published a vivid picture of the terrible risks the elderly face. Today, America Online spotlited that story in one of the four sequential billboards you see when you log onto the AOL service and linger a few moments to see what’s new.

When Concetta McGrath, 76, a widow in Staten Island, sold the home she had shared with her husband for over 50 years, she took $90,000 of the proceeds and put it into the stock market. It was 2001 and she hoped that the gains generated by the investment would bolster her monthly Social Security benefits of $800.

But soon after she invested in an Oppenheimer mutual fund, its value began to drop. When the fund lost a third of its value, Ms. McGrath cashed out, spent $15,000 on living expenses and put the remaining $45,000 into banking institution stocks for safety.

Today, some two and a half years after her foray into the market, Ms. McGrath says her account is worth $28,000. Now, she worries about outliving her money.

$90,000 to $28,000. This is what George W. Bush and his party of plutocrats wants for the people of this country: millions of small investors giving the rich money to play with, and losing their shirts at a time when they can’t afford to replace the money they lose because they can’t work.
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The attempt to destroy Social Security as a government benefit and transform it into a three-card-Monte con on the elderly must be stopped..
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Yesterday, iWon.com’s daily survey of opinion gave these three pieces of economic news as leadup to its questions, under the heading “Poor Getting Poorer”:

The number of Americans living in poverty increased by 1.3 million people to 35.8 million in 2003, according to the U.S. Census. It is the third straight year that poverty levels have increased. [That is, the entire Bush term of office.] * * *
The report also showed that the number of citizens without healthcare had risen by 1.4 million to 45 million in 2003. It is the third straight year that these levels have risen as well. [Again, the entire Bush term of office. What a coinkydink!] * * *
The Census report also showed that salaries remained flat in 2003. [Which means many people actually lost money, given that inflation, tho low, still does exist. If your salary doesn’t rise but prices do, you lose money.]

What iWon did not report is that even as the poor (and middle class) are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer. The gap between the “haves” and “havenots” is growing ever wider and more obscene, not just here at home but around the world. And the Republican Party is in large part responsible, certainly at home, and contributorily abroad.
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It is urgently important that the Presidency and Congress be returned to Democratic control in November and that the people put enormous pressure on government to reverse the Plutocratic Revolution started by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, in which “The top tax rate was lowered from 50% to 28% [a 44% cut on the taxes on the wealthy!] while the bottom rate was raised from 11% to 15%.” The good features of that reform, tax simplification and an attempt to eliminate tax shelters — which, of course, the rich, with their expensive accountants and tax lawyers have found ways around — could not begin to equal the harm that massive reduction of taxes on the rich has produced. We have seen a stark reconcentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and the rich are getting even greedier, demanding cuts on estate taxes — which affect only the wealthy, since estate tax does not apply to estates of less than $900,000 — even lower tax rates on earned income, and preferential treatment of capital gains (a type of income poor and middle class people do not get).
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John Edwards tried to raise some of these issues in his abortive campaign for the Presidency. He has let many of them go and submerged his campaign talk in the themes designated by Senator Kerry. That’s a mistake. Edwards AND Kerry MUST start talking about the hard and ugly economic injustice that is getting worse and worse under the Republicans. That way lies victory. And it’s what the Nation needs.
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Ignore all other issues, many of which are nonissues because the candidates both agree, or differ so little as to be in essential agreement, as on security, the war on terror, education — almost everything but a few social issues. Even there, they aren’t far apart on most. Kerry is against gay marriage almost as much as Dubya. So what really matters this election, is economic justice, reversing and destroying the Plutocratic Revolution; paying down the national debt; drastically reducing interest rates charged the poor and middle class, easing bankruptcy, and otherwise acting to remove the crushing burden of personal debt from scores of millions of Americans. That’s what this election must be about. And on that, you must vote Democratic, because the Republicans are doing everything in their power to make everyone but the rich into wage slaves and debt slaves who will take cuts in pay and benefits so the rich can become even richer and look down their nose at the rest of us.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:00 PM