Inflation and living to be 100

After getting one of my first jobs, I learned that I would be eligible for a pension plan. The year was 1968 and I assumed that my retirement financial needs would be secure. There was a debate, as is the case today, about the pending failure of Social Security. I expected to be OK in the event of a Social Security collapse since I would have a pension plan.

As gas lines got longer and inflation exploded in the 1970s, my wife and I joked that when I receive pension checks, the value of my monthly checks would not buy a loaf of bread. The problem was that my pension plan was a defined benefit plan that did not increase with inflation or a growing stock market. I shifted to a 403-b pension plan when I changed jobs.

Other employed workers could not do the same and they reached retirement age without adequate incomes. Should older people be able to live on their Social Security checks? Should all working people get Social Security?

My father died about 20 years ago and my mother died about 10 years ago. She could not live on her tiny Social Security check, but she was lucky to have children who would supplement her Social Security check. Her main "job" for most of her adult years was "homemaker" and her salary was zero with little contribution to Social Security.

When enacted in 1935, laws creating Social Security were designed from the outset to exclude from coverage about half the workers in the American economy. Among the excluded groups were agricultural and domestic workers. There is a perverse irony in the fact that some of the hardest working Americans were not allowed to grow old with dignity. I have seen people roll down a window and yell "get a job" to a beggar without asking if the beggar had worked for decades picking our food until he could not do stoop labor.

What about the future for our elderly people? This is where the longevity issues have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that half of our 5-year-olds in wealthy countries are expected to live to 100. The bad news is that society isn't prepared.

In 1974, I volunteered to chaperone bus loads of low-risk prisoners at the Avon Park Correctional Institution. I was not armed and never lost a prisoner. We visited local nursing or assisted living places where the prisoners played music, danced with the old ladies, or just pulled up a chair next to someone in a wheelchair and talked.

I came away remembering the awful smell in the buildings and thinking I never want to spend the end of my life in these institutions. Later, I learned that budgets were inadequate to maintain air quality on the level of our local hospitals. I was impressed, however, with the assisted living and correctional institutions partnership and I hope it continues today.

Do I want to live to be 100? No thank you. I am old enough to remember when a McDonald's burger cost less than the sales tax on 2023 burgers. I have an app on my phone that tracks my walking and reports every month. My phone just told me that based on an analyst of my recent walking, it is likely that I will fall in the next 12 months.

Businessweek Magazine just published an article with the headline, "Can AI Help You to Die." It is about doctors in New Jersey experimenting with software to prompt discussions with patients about palliative or hospice care. Have you spoken with your doctors about inflation and living to be 100. I doubt it.