Posted on 05/29/2013 8:08:27 AM PDT by blam
It's High Time America Did Away With Senior Discounts
Alex Mayyasi, Priceonomics Blog
May 29, 2013, 10:44 AM
You’ve seen them on the bus, in museums, and at movie theaters: senior discounts.
As a reward for being old, senior citizens pay a quarter less for bus fare, a small fortune less for movie tickets, and receive discounts generally all over the place.
If you’re a twentysomething, or part of what some journalists have colorfully called “the screwed generation,” you may be wondering: why not me?
The idea that seniors are a group in need of help and protection dates back to the thirties, when America’s senior citizens were disproportionately poor and affected by the Depression wiping out everyone's savings.
In 1935, President Roosevelt passed the Social Security Act, which gave federal assistance to the elderly. This became the norm. Aid to seniors increased over time, in particular with the creation of Medicare in 1965 and the passage of an amendment indexing social security to cost of living increases and creating an additional Supplemental Security Income for seniors in 1972.
As two poverty economists note, “One of the most striking trends in elderly well-being in the twentieth century was the dramatic decline in income poverty among the elderly.” This can be seen in the graph below.
The United States only began measuring poverty in the 1960s, so we lack standard figures dating farther back than that. But it’s recognized that the trend of decreasing poverty among seniors dates back to the thirties and forties. 2011 Census figures place poverty among Americans aged 65 and older at 8.7%, well below the national average of 15%.
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(Excerpt) Read more at priceonomics.com ...
But businesses who offer a senior citizens discount to keep their revenue stream up so they can AFFORD TO PAY THEIR EMPLOYEES, is not fine with you ?
I am saying that NOW - AFTER I paid into this stupid system for 40 years.
I am no kiddie (well, sometimes :P )
You might not live in a rural/tourist area of the West or a suburb, so you might not have seen what I was referring to. You might also be understanding. I was not referring to all older women, either, and many of the guilty ones have effeminate men living with them—men who go along with whatever dirty social/political wave that washes through our country. But it happens too often.
I’ve done some of my own building on my own properties here and there over a few decades. All of the allegations that against private property rights in several places has been from older women against new, small manufacturing shops, sawmills, owner-built projects and just about anything that might be seen from roads near properties.
In one case, all of a ranching family’s property was taken (several million) because of nothing more than scores of false allegations made by a few older women with many others supporting them in gossip (their sensitive New Age guys included) in the large, sparsely populated area. The false accusers didn’t want range cattle on their properties, but they wouldn’t build fences. They were afraid their free-ranging dogs would be shot for chasing cattle. They believe that they are somehow special. They’ve demanded tax hikes for more socialists perks, while every one of them claims to be conservative and old fashioned.
I’m older than some of them, by the way, and younger than others—pretty much in the middle of our rotten Baby Boomer generation. So yes, I’ve seen what my peers were getting away with all the way, including seeing one record after another of my past employment deleted in the reports we receive from the Social Security office. But this debt regime is going to cost us all, and the unavoidable debt repudiation, regulation-repealing and currency adjustment process will straighten the mess out.
After the mess is straightened out with the needed large cuts against public spending, this “arrogant male” is going to start making parts (if still living). I’ll train other, younger “males” (and any younger women willing), No debt-sucking neighborhood gossip (or supporting effeminate boyfriend) will have the money or time to stop me then.
When so many older people decide to lobby for so much more government spending on themselves, immunities, exemptions, etc., there’s a national problem. Same with other groups full of members who disagree on many things (e.g., communists in collaboration with new, fake conservatives). I’ve thrown all commie, misogamist (family-hating) AARP mail in the trash for a couple of decades.
I stand with any younger folks who want to try to live the old fashioned way, regardless of the immoralities foisted on them by my generation in business, government and academia. Me? I won’t be around very long. The few years (if that) will be gone in a flash.
To the many others who’ve been talking about their imagined end of the world and their plans to “survive” it, the world is not ending. We are ending. And we couldn’t hold a candle to the 289 generations before us.
And politics? Both political parties are full of dishonest, socialist trash. We cant’ afford their violations of civil rights (constitutional rights), their extortions from the same or their demands for yet more big-spending services including the medical racket. And the debt won’t be paid in a generation. There’s not that much time left before the debt can be no longer maintained.
ho-lee crap!!!!
I have yet to ask for my first senior discount - I am 55 now
I can’t wait. I will do it when my kiddies are with me
No boomer was voting in the "mid-1960s" and the first election in which all boomers were old enough to vote for president, was in 1984.
Baby Boomers and other seniors walk around acting like they’re owed everything.
Good luck getting rid of the discounts.
Not accurate by a long shot. I'm a baby boomer (born in 1953), and the first presidential election I participated in was in 1972.
According to Wikipedia, we were born between the years 1946 and 1964.
The boomers date 1946 through 1964, 1968 was the first presidential election that picked up some of the first boomers.
In 1968 the democrats won 47% of the under 30 vote, in 1972 with the war raging and the draft on, and the voting age having been lowered to 18, the democrats won 46% of the under 30 vote.
Read my post again the first presidential election in which “ALL” boomers were old enough to vote in, for instance Sarah Palin (born 1964), was the 1984 election.
Stupid article misses the point that the senior discount is meant to induce seniors to spend. The young burn through all their money without inducement. Seniors tend to hang around the house, going out little, shopping little. They don’t buy new “wardrobes”. They don’t eat lunches out daily like many workers do. They have ample money and senior discounts are the way private business tries to coax seniors to get out and spend.
Beyond that, there is no law forcing businesses to offer senior discounts. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t offer them.
You are thinking of the ‘silent generation’ as the people you know from the 1960s, The Doors, the Beatles, Hendrix, Jane Fonda, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Janis Joplin.
Hippies were well established in 1965 when the oldest boomer was only a teen, do you think that the 1 year old to 19 year olds are running America right now, the culture, the courts, the legislation, the institutions, etc. ?
I'm sure that you can find a party desiring to pass an anti-business law, try the party that fought to ban ladies night.
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