More Weighty Issues

Senior Citizen Cost of Living: In the past couple of months it was announced that Social Security benefits would not be increased to cover cost of living increases. The calculations indicated that little inflation drove up the cost of living for seniors. At the same time Medicare was requesting a hefty premium increase or a budget subsidy. If the latter did not arrive in time, Medicare said it would implement a 50+% increase in its premiums deducted from Social Security checks. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these matters, our Medicare premium is  $105.50 per month. An increase over 50% would amount to $52 per month or more being deducted from SS checks. That is a huge cost of living increase. 

Average SS monthly benefits are currently about $750 or $800. You see the problem here? Later retirees (younger) receive much higher benefit checks, but still $50 per month on a net check of $1500 to $1700 is not insignificant.

Then there are other current events issues that need consideration here. Transportation costs are driven by purchase price of cars, repairs to same, and insurance costs on top of all of that. If anyone thinks these costs are staying the same or going down, what planet are they living on? And food costs?

But the corker is medical costs. These rise incessantly for drugs, doctor visits, co-pays, insurance premiums in addition to Medicare coverage (all required) and hospital stays. Medical costs are one thing seniors cannot avoid unless they die. Period. Now do policy makers and politicians strutting upon the stage get the point? 

We haven’t even contemplated living costs – utilities, rent (yes, more seniors are renting now because they could no longer afford their homes, maybe even lost it in the last recession, and so forth?)  With the collapse of the housing market, so did the equity stash that most seniors were counting on.

Policy, folks. Policy. When it is made it must look at all the factors it is supposed to cover. For senior citizens, cost of living is a very complex issue unless you are well fixed financially.

I now want to shift attention to suicides and family murders. Although mass public shootings capture the headlines quickly because of their awful size and coldness, there is another kind of violence in our land that seems ever present. That is murder-suicides wherein one person in a relationship gone sour kills the love object person and them himself. It is usually a man doing the violence against women and kids. Entire families are slaughtered by a father or divorced dad who then kills himself on top of the mayhem.

I don’t know if this violence is picking up momentum or just my imagination. I think it is more frequent these days; if I’m right I suspect finances gone awry may be a trigger to the dissolution of the family anchorage and thus despondency grows and leads to murder and suicide. If failing finances is the cause as I suspect, then the recent recession (and hanging on recession!) may be the culprit of an increase in frequency of these tragedies.

There are many families which are visiting the recession repeatedly. These are the ones with wage earners in marginal jobs that disappear soonest and earn the lower rates of pay. No wonder such families feel the economic strains again and again.

To add to this woe is the growing underclass of aging and retired people who have had financial disaster visit them on top of the economy, their health, and failed retirement plans laid out in healthier times. These millions are very susceptible to murder-suicide pressures.

I think much needs to be researched. The questions should include these:

1. What is the history of murder-suicide in America over the past 50 to 75 years? Is it on the increase? Are their fluctuations observed to coincide with financial cycles of recession/boom/bust?
2. What programs are designed and offered by the public sector to combat murder-suicide?
3. What are the other contributing factors to this problem other than finances? Is gun ownership a related issue or not? 

Add your own research questions and ask a local university or college to go to work on these if they haven’t already.

Meantime, pray for the victims of these crimes, and especially pray for the doers of the deeds; their pressure and mental chaos must be overwhelming!

November 10, 2015