LAS VEGAS — I found our discussion unhinging. Here I was, sitting at breakfast with two friends in a Caesars Palace café and talking as friends talk.
Like most conversations with my friends, I never know what topics we’ll discuss; I can’t know what direction any particular one might veer, even when friends share most views that are in concord.
When you find one that isn’t, you end up feeling as I did, and “unsettling” was the kindest word that I could lean on. Perhaps “angry” might’ve been a more apt one.
It fit too.
I ought to mention a few things first: Both men were white; both were 50ish; both owned their homes. Without hesitation, I’d describe them as decidedly upper-middle class.
As we talked, they bemoaned the state of Social Security, the government-backed safety net for people when they retire or can’t work anymore. The system is, of course, on tenuous financial grounds, and you hear often that it’ll go belly-up in decades ahead.
Thought of the latter worried my friends. Although both had been setting aside money in retirement portfolios, they wanted what the government promised. If Uncle Sam can’t deliver, they want the system to stop taking money out of their paychecks.
“The government should let us decide how to invest this money,” one of them said.
The other nodded.
When the first said “us,” he meant people — all people. He meant those who live in Appalachia, those who live in the Outhwaite Homes whose 40-hour-a-week gig at Chick-fil-A has kept them tottering on the margins. What do any of them likely know about a Roth IRA, a Fidelity annuity or a company match on a 401K?
It’s easy for those whose net worth goes into seven figures to talk about such financial instruments, but people who survive paycheck to paycheck would never squeeze much out of investing the money they earn.
A person making, say, $25,000 a year pays $2,000 into Social Security, plus city and state taxes, takes home less than $20,000. Did my friends believe a person on this end of the socioeconomic spectrum would invest that two grand?
He wouldn’t. He has too many immediate needs to fret about his tomorrows.
Look at how poor people handled stimulus checks. They were supposed to use the money to put food in the cupboards and pay rent. If they did pay rent, explain why evictions sped forward like a bullet train?
My white friends saw Social Security through kaleidoscopic eyes. Their reality is one of well-to-do privilege. They can delude themselves into thinking their retirement planning reflects what people who live in my East Side neighborhood see.
I wish it were so; I wish we could put the financial burden on what retirement looks like in each person’s hands. We can’t risk it.
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt made that obvious when he signed the Social Security Act in 1935.
I doubt my white friends think about what this monthly payment does for retirees who aren’t middle class. Sadly, these men looked only at themselves, not the plight of the have-nots. No person wants to be poor.
“What are we if we don’t care about them?” I said.
I presume my friends thought we should tell the poor to just eat cake.
Justice B. Hill grew up and still lives in the Glenville neighborhood. He wrote and edited for several newspapers in his more than 25 years in daily journalism before settling into teaching at Ohio University. He quit May 15, 2019, to write and globetrot. He’s doing both.