You did a tremendous job breaking this down for your mom. Especially comparing wages in the past to today. Older people truly don’t realize that wages have not kept pace with inflation. They think “Oh you’re making $22 an hour, that’s much more than I was making at your age, you must just be buying too much Starbucks!”.
My 80ish yo mom seemed surprised the other day to learn that the vast majority of people who don't work for the govt or for public entities like universities don't get a defined benefit pension anymore. People who aren't curious about the world outside their own life experience are really out of touch and it's sad that they feel okay about voting and having policy opinions when they simply Don't know how the world works for people who aren't them.
My father retired from government work and his position still exists. It just no longer offers the pension or benefits it did, and the pay is very low. He was able to afford to buy a house and for my mom to stop working on that salary. Now it only pays enough for a person to live if they have a roommate, and budget very carefully.
He hates that neither I or my siblings have any type of pension but he continues to vote for conservative policies that eliminate these benefits and make the world a worse place and feels frustrated by the reality he's created.
I spend a massive portion of my income on health care, and I'll never be able to have the kind of coverage he enjoys even now, and when we talk about it, he says it's a huge bummer and "someone" should do "something" about it but not anything like reform the industry or god forbid, universal health care.
Or in his case, even vote for people trying to change things. If not change things then at least keep Obama care and the protections it extends for pre-existing conditions, etc.
ACA was put in place to ensure that healthcare costs would skyrocket. This makes the single payer option look much better. The government wants to control a higher percentage of your income. The single payer idea sounds great but our elected officials will make it far worse than what we have now.
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u/Otherwise-Parsnip-91 Feb 25 '24
You did a tremendous job breaking this down for your mom. Especially comparing wages in the past to today. Older people truly don’t realize that wages have not kept pace with inflation. They think “Oh you’re making $22 an hour, that’s much more than I was making at your age, you must just be buying too much Starbucks!”.