Samuel Moyn
speaker
281 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Samuel Moyn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The fortunes, you know, of older people in our country have radically shifted.
Of course, it's true that they were once the worst off, in part because when we were much more a country that involved physical labor,
people were kind of injured out of their jobs and had nothing to turn to.
And it's for that reason that Franklin Roosevelt's Social Security Act in 1935 was such a transformative moment.
At the same time, it wasn't that costly because there were so few older people, especially living on.
And there was an enormous number of able-bodied younger workers who could fund these programs.
That's not true now.
But while it's important to acknowledge how many older people there are who are poor, the rate of their poverty is no greater than any other cohort of adults.
And of course, they're way better off than children are.
Donald Trump's one big beautiful bill cuts SNAP benefits for children in poverty.
And so, if we're concerned about poverty, we should maybe look a lot more than we have at children.
Older people, especially when you get to the upper echelons of the class structure, have been the great winners of the latter part of the 20th century, in part because of some asset bubbles, in part because of all the special privileges that
have been built into our tax code and in part because the abolition of mandatory retirement.
Why was mandatory retirement abolished?
Well, it was abolished across the country due to the AARP and a federal law called the Age Discrimination and Employment Act that
was revised a few times between the 1960s when it was first written and the early 1990s.
And essentially, in all but a few sectors like air traffic control or airline pilot, mandatory retirement was made illegal.
Well, I think it largely consists of tax breaks ever since California started the property tax revolts of our time.
The outcome of many of our tax laws has been to immunize older people's possessions from taxation, which once would have been a very noble cause given that they've lost income.
But as a result of some of these asset booms, these aging Americans are sitting in very nice houses, the best there are.
Showing 101–120 of 281 · page 6 of 15
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