Twenty-first century politics has been a tug-of-war between “We’re all in this together” and “You’re on your own, Jack.” It’s no secret which side of that rope Donald Trump has been pulling for most of his presidency.
The only age group John McCain won in the 2008 election was the over-65 crowd (to be fair, a lot of those who were over 65 in 2008 are no longer with us). In 2012, apparently outraged that Obamacare was helping get healthcare to people who weren’t old enough to qualify for Medicare yet, a majority of those older than 65 voted for Mitt Romney (he won that age group by 12 points). Among validated voters in the 2016 election, even though Clinton won the most votes overall by three points, the 65-plus crowd preferred Trump over Clinton, 53 percent to 44 percent.
As of early 2020, there was majority support for “Medicare for All.” Guess which age group had the lowest level of support for Medicare for All though? Among those 65 and older (who already have regular Medicare for themselves, of course), only 35 percent supported Medicare for All — 55 percent opposed it.
A graph with level of support for cancelling student loan debt on the y-axis and with age on the x-axis is a quarter pipe skateboard ramp. It’s worth remembering that today a student comes out of law school with something like $123,511 in student loan debt, but law school tuition in the mid-1980s was about $2,000 a semester and could be largely paid off in real time with a decent part-time job.
A 2019 NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll found overwhelming majorities of Millennials and Gen-Xers thought “a Green New Deal to address climate change by investing government money in green jobs and energy efficient infrastructure” was a good idea. Substantially fewer baby boomers and their surviving elders supported the idea, although more people in every age group supported a Green New Deal than opposed it. Good job on that one anyway, most old people.
You get the idea. While there are always substantial minorities of older Americans who support progressive policies that, versus the status quo, would disproportionately benefit younger Americans, the collective level of support among older Americans is almost always the lowest of any age group for any policy that would help younger people more than themselves.
Meanwhile, the health effects of coronavirus have been borne extremely disproportionately by older Americans. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report looking at over 4,200 US cases reported from February 12 to March 16. Approximately 80 percent of COVID-19 deaths occurred in people 65 and older. Not a single child died during that period. More than half of the coronavirus patients who wound up in intensive care units were 65 or older. Not one coronavirus sufferer under the age of 19 was admitted to an intensive care unit from February 12 to March 16. The report mirrors findings in other countries that have been dealing with coronavirus longer than the United States has. Based on research on the death toll in Wuhan, China, where the virus began, the fatality rate for those with symptomatic COVID-19 appeared to be about 0.5 percent for those aged 15 to 64, but about 2.7 percent for those over 64. The chances of those younger than 15 being seriously harmed were so low that scientists estimated a fatality rate of zero for that age group.
There are plenty of examples of coronavirus felling people younger than 65, I get that it’s a real threat to everyone, please don’t write me angry emails. Still, anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of probability realizes that coronavirus is a way, way bigger threat to people 65 and older than to anyone younger, and the threat gets less serious the younger you are.
In response to this threat — almost exclusively a threat to old people — we have closed schools, shuttered bars and restaurants, utterly destroyed a good economy (to largely benefit people who are mostly retired and no longer working in it), and put a complete stop to public gatherings of any kind throughout nearly the entire country (getting together is a constitutionally safeguarded right, by the way). People like me in their mid-30s aren’t doing all this to protect ourselves. If a maybe one-percent chance of encountering my own death scared me, I probably wouldn’t ride around on a motorcycle all summer. No, we’re doing all this for our elders, especially those over the age of 65.
So, if you’re an antiprogressive older American, and you don’t die from coronavirus over the next year, maybe recognize the sacrifices the rest of us are making, for you, and show us some goddamn respect for a change. Consider that in the voting booth this fall too and support some policies that will actually make the earth a better place for the generations that follow you.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.