Word on the Street: Why Social Security Matters
Deliria Jaramillo – Albuquerque, New Mexico
The other night I was calling our members in Deming. An older gentleman answered the phone and he expressed right away that no one ever calls him and that he was pleased to talk to me. He is 75 years old and has run out of his retirement savings.
He said his Social Security is his only source of income. He told me that he has been looking for work in order to pay all of his bills and have some money left for groceries, but there isn’t a lot of work available in Deming. He told me, “I can’t go back into the fields, my body can’t handle it and the only other thing that is here is Wal-Mart. I have tried applying, but I never heard back from them. I don’t know how much longer I can continue to live like this.”
It was a heart-breaking story, but as we neared the end of the conversation he told me he would really appreciate if I stayed in touch with him and that he would be willing to help out with organizing his community around our message. It made me feel good to be able to reach out to someone and show them that Working America wants to hear from them – that we care about their story and that we are finding ways to get them involved.
Odd. This man’s story is pretty much the norm today.
Unlike the millions whose wages have steadily been pushed downward ever since the 1980s, at least he did have some retirement savings. Social Security for one is roughly double what was allotted to families of two under our former AFDC system, and America insisted that AFDC recipients lived in comfort.
Social Security disability has seen a number of benefit cuts and freezes in recent years. When your Social Security doesn’t cover your expenses, cut your expenses. Move to cheaper housing, sell your car and anything of worth that you still have, etc. That’s just reality, and living at the poverty line leaves you FAR better off than millions of your fellow citizens today. What our government has learned, very clearly, is that most Americans today don’t care about things like social justice, and are utterly indifferent to the suffering of our own poor.
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