{"id":341063,"date":"2017-12-25T23:21:51","date_gmt":"2017-12-25T22:21:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/diverting-class-warfare-into-generational-warfare\/"},"modified":"2017-12-25T23:21:51","modified_gmt":"2017-12-25T22:21:51","slug":"diverting-class-warfare-into-generational-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/diverting-class-warfare-into-generational-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"Diverting Class Warfare Into Generational Warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><span class=\"wf_caption\" style=\"display: block; max-width: 640px; width: 100%;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/images\/Images_2017_12\/2017_1225t_.jpg\" alt=\"President Donald Trump (L, bottom) leaves after speaking about newly passed tax reform legislation during an event December 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski \/ AFP \/ Getty Images)\" width=\"640\" style=\"width: 100%;\"\/><span style=\"text-align: left; margin-top: 3px; display: block;\">President Donald Trump leaves after speaking about newly passed tax reform legislation during an event December 20, 2017, in Washington, DC. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski \/ AFP \/ Getty Images)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>With the Republicans having just passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut, the bulk of which goes to the richest 1 percent, it was inevitable that the generational warriors would come out of the woodwork and resume the attack on Social Security and Medicare. Generational warriors try to divert attention away from how our economy has redistributed income upwards over the last four decades, and convince a large portion of today&#8217;s workers that their real problems stem from their parents&#8217; and grandparents&#8217; overly generous retirement benefits.<\/p>\n<p>The opening shot in this new round of generational warfare showed up earlier this month in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/2017\/12\/grandparents-raiding-grandchildren\/548117\/?utm_source=nl-politics-daily-121217&amp;silverid=MzQxNzYyODQzNzIwS0\" target=\"_blank\">The Atlantic Magazine<\/a>. It told the classic story about how seniors are getting too much money back from Social Security and Medicare, the same thing we&#8217;ve been seeing for decades. (There is little expectation of originality if you&#8217;re in the business of promoting generational warfare.)<\/p>\n<p>In fact, middle-income seniors will <a href=\"https:\/\/www.urban.org\/research\/publication\/social-security-and-medicare-lifetime-benefits-and-taxes\/view\/full_report\" target=\"_blank\">get somewhat less back<\/a> from Social Security than they paid into the system. The cost of Medicare benefits does exceed their taxes, but this is because Americans pay twice as much for our doctors, drugs, medical equipment and other health care items than people in other wealthy countries.<\/p>\n<p>The real problem is high-income people in the health care sector making too much money, not the country being too generous to its seniors. But, the folks promoting generational warfare aren&#8217;t interested in clamping down on the rich doctors and drug companies; they want us to go after retired school teachers and retail clerks.<\/p>\n<p>Even if Social Security and Medicare were more generous, it would still say almost nothing about generational equity. While the generational warriors would like to have everyone focus on the cost of programs that primarily serve the elderly, paying for&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/opinion\/item\/43022-diverting-class-warfare-into-generational-warfare\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Donald Trump leaves after speaking about newly passed tax reform legislation during an event December 20, 2017, in Washington, DC. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski \/ AFP \/ Getty Images) With the Republicans having just passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut, the bulk of which goes to the richest 1 percent, it was inevitable that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":341064,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-341063","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}