Sex, Viagra, and taxes

...when generations lose confidence in the degree to which they can rely on one another, the result is not generational conflict but generational indifference...

...Viagra may be "sex-enhancing," but it is also thereby lifeenhancing if for no other reason than that it helps maintain the emotional ties between partners...

...One is procreation, and the other is recreation...

...But the crucial factor is the shift to the entirely American emphasis on individual responsibility— ignoring the larger meaning of "social" in Social Security...

...Instead of beneficiaries' being able to appear in person, "most hearings will be held with videoconference equipment or by telephone...

...If we combine privatization—with all the risks that stock market investments entail—and "progressive indexation" there is good reason for coming generations to fear for their futures...

...each generation, in short, has a responsibility for the care and support of the elderly...

...The term "lifestyle" by itself still evokes some vague associations with the counterculture of the 1960s, but "lifestyle drugs" conjures up sharper images of irresponsible, pot-smoking youngsters getting high and dancing through a night that ends in hooking up...

...it is a difficulty that results in an experience of increasing social isolation...

...The loss of confidence is not entirely unjustified given the administration's position on taxes as abominations...

...When today's workers reach retirement age their benefits will be paid by taxes on their successors' incomes...

...It seems clear that from his perspective these pleasures are only carnal—nothing but physical gratification...

...This looks like another instance of callous conservatism: why deny the joys of sex to the elderly...

...that is, the need for individual responsibility, maintaining benefits for the poor, and retaining all current tax cuts...

...This loss of confidence—symptomatic of weakening ties between generations—along with the administration's relentless insistence on the need for individuals to secure their own future, makes "reform" a source of social divisiveness...

...Social Security is a force for social unity...

...Still, King is probably not comfortable with elderly people engaging in recreational sex even if it would not entail more taxes...

...Public opinion surveys report that Americans in their twenties and thirties, the offspring of the baby boom generation, doubt that Social Security will be able to provide the same benefits to them as it does now...

...We have only a finite amount of money...

...There are only two reasons for sex...

...We are promoting abstinence for young people with raging hormones, and yet we are going to ask them to pay taxes for sex-enhancing drugs for seniors...

...that is, in the future only the poorest among the elderly will not see a reduction in benefits...

...a reminder that the carnal pleasures experienced by committed partners are intertwined with mutual love...

...The president's proposals for dealing with 80 DISSENT / Fall 2005 NOTEBOOK the "crisis" in Social Security are also close to King's views...

...Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, the New York Times reported, immediately declared that he would introduce a bill prohibiting Medicare from paying for such "lifestyle drugs...

...Contributing to this sense of social distance is the actual physical distance between members of families in a modern society and the relative isolation from other relationships that are consequences of aging...

...Perhaps King does not consider this a relevant consideration, because the anxieties of those concerned with "family values" focus mainly on raging hormones...

...In traditional China, for example, male children had the responsibility of supporting aged parents...

...But there is another possible consequence...

...Since all work and no play makes Jack a dull—and therefore less efficient—boy, play can enhance production...

...But when individual responsibility becomes the centerpiece of social policy, and people lose confidence in any future mutuality, the communal networks are torn apart...

...Social Security is founded on that social understanding—of the nation as a community...

...If we are going to subsidize someone's recreational sex, I don't think that's what the founding fathers had in mind...

...They fail to see any connection between the sex lives of the elderly and family ties because they probably assume, not unreasonably, that the elderly's hormones are rather more quiescent or that age precludes productive sex...

...The excuse of "only a finite amount of money" is a selective one never invoked when pork barrel legislation is on the table...

...He had already introduced a resolution to repeal the 16th Amendment...

...To think socially is to see all persons and groups as related in a network of mutual obligations and responsibilities...

...The continued insistence that the poor won't suffer from the effects of "progressive indexation"—the claim of compassionate conservatism—in effect assimilates Social Security to a program of poor relief...

...Elderly couples must now cope with many of their difficulties by themselves, so the strength of their relationships is a major resource in dealing with the problems of this stage of the life cycle...

...Sometimes it may be necessary, as with the anticipated shortfalls in Social Security and the problems some European countries are experiencing, to reduce benefits or raise taxes— with the understanding that any change must have the least harmful consequences for current and future beneficiaries...

...And even when the distance is not very far, increasing age makes it more difficult for the elderly to travel...

...This one is a variation of our culture's traditional opposition of work and play...

...In fact, King's rhetoric is a cruder version of the administration's own rhetoric, and its actual policies, on Medicare and Social Security...

...Incidentally, although Viagra and others of its kind work only for males, their partners would also be denied the pleasures of sex if King is sucDISSENT / Fall 2005 79 NOTEBOOK cessful...

...When families lived closer together and married children were not so pressed for time, they could more easily provide aid to parents in need of help...

...The shift in emphasis from the social to the individual is, in effect, an implicit definition of the elderly as a burden on the society...

...Social Security may be understood as a modern extension of the norm of filial loyalty that is still a central value of many societies...

...some national system must take on that function...

...Relying solely on families to provide for the elderly is impossible in modern, industrialized economies with highly mobile populations...

...Valentine's Day was fast approaching: time to purchase a gift for a beloved one...

...The undeserving in the past were those not entitled to "the resources of others" because their poverty DISSENT / Fall 2005 81 NOTEBOOK was not "the natural result of misfortune" but a consequence, in the words of a nineteenthcentury minister quoted in John Ireland's Poverty in America, "of willful error, of shameful indolence, of vicious habit...

...To be sure, the president is not now trying to rid us of "that fat leech in Washington," but it is clear that his own sentiments are similar to King's: cutting taxes trumps the objective of maintaining, to say nothing of improving, the quality of life of the elderly...

...These hearings, once held in 140 Social Security offices around the country, will become the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services and be heard by judges located in just four sites around the country...

...If Viagra is that kind of drug, then the elderly who would use it are no better than the young getting stoned on marijuana or worse...

...This is not a "conflict of generations...

...As such, it can be seen as strengthening marriages—it is a prop of "family values...

...The celebration of St...

...His proposals center on three main points: privatization...

...Bush initially emphasized privatization as a means of reforming the system without raising taxes, although he conceded that privatization would not solve the anticipated financial problems...

...And King feels strongly about taxes...

...But further reflection suggests that his views and those of the president are closely related, and that both represent a newly emerging perception of the elderly...

...Of the 283,000 cases heard in the past five years "beneficiaries and providers prevailed in two thirds" of them...

...An essential clue to where we are heading with respect to the status of the elderly may be found in the way we think about the poor...

...The situation, rather, is like the one where the family budget will not permit the purchase of the new fishing rod we have been lusting for: Medicare beneficiaries have to forgo the joys of sex if it means additional taxes...

...When one generation contributes to the support of its parental generation and can, in turn, confidently expect that its children's generation will contribute to its support, this creates a tie between generations that mirrors on a societywide scale the familial ties of traditional societies...

...after all, just as work can sometimes be pleasurable, so pleasure can be a collateral benefit of procreative sex...

...We are still very far from seeing the elderly as strangers to be pitied or despised or punished, even if King's outrage is taken to indicate something more significant than simple meanness...

...Play" or recreation is its opposite: its nonproductive pleasures are denied by the daily grind...

...Other options for dealing with the "crisis," like eliminating the cap on the Social Security tax or raising the tax by small increments, are ruled out by the basic premise of the entire "reform": all the current tax cuts will remain in place, and there will be no future tax increases...

...But this would be a mistake, because once the elderly are perceived as a cause of increased taxes on the working, productive population, the inevitable next step is to think of "reforming the system...

...I doubt that King would deny everyone the pleasures of sex...

...When Medicare covers Viagra pills, you are, in effect, taking money away from someone else's life-saving drugs...

...But in the current battles over Social Security and Medicare, the Bush administration and other powerful groups are pushing policies that would set our society on a course that can easily culminate in perceptions of the old folks at home as "outsiders," who are "them" and not "us...

...The real issue is what shall have priority: helping the elderly maintain a certain quality of life or reducing taxes...

...Only the poorest members of the society are to remain a social obligation...

...To the extent that administration rhetoric links poverty and old age in the public's mind, the tendency will grow to perceive the elderly as people who are really different from the rest of us...

...Obviously, maintaining sexual intimacy—the giving and receiving of love and its carnal satisfactions— is not the most critical factor in keeping the relationship strong or perhaps even a necessary one, but that is no reason to ignore it entirely or define it as irresponsible indulgence...

...Its central message, though never explicitly stated, is that individuals must take the major responsibilities for their futures as elderly people—Social Security is to become individual security...

...Significant numbers of them are separated by long distances from their children and grandchildren, whose parents, more often than not these days, are both working...

...It is not difficult to see that complaints via teleconferences will result in fewer favorable judgments for the elderly, especially when the new rules require judges to " 'give substantial deference' to manuals and guidelines issued by Medicare officials...

...it would abolish the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service and so "finally rid Americans of that fat leech they feed their paychecks to...

...82 DISSENT / Fall 2005...

...He makes "recreational sex" seem very much like a "willful error," while authorizing "lifestyle drugs" as a benefit seems akin to abetting a "vicious habit...

...In April he announced a plan of "progressive indexation" that would preserve the current benefits of lowwage workers but would cut the benefits of the remaining 70 percent of workers: those at the average income level in 2055 would, according to a Times story, receive benefits "20 percent lower than what they would expect to receive under current law when they retire at age 67...

...What is more, if we add taxes to the equation and ask the young with their raging hormones to defer sexual gratification until marriage, then our taxes should not subsidize "sex-enhancing" drugs for those well past the urgencies of sex...

...Privatization subverts these assumptions...

...They are burdens the community must suffer...

...Investment returns resulting from privatization would presumably make up the difference...

...Indeed, a common euphemism for the physical act of sex is "making love...

...Valentine symbolizes the belief that the giving and receiving of love is, to paraphrase King, life-enhancing...

...THERE IS, THOUGH, an important connection...

...TODAY, TAXES on the earned income of the working population support Social Security benefits...

...MURRAY HAUSKNECHT is a sociologist who writes frequently for Dissent...

...Above all, though, work is productive...

...The retreat to gated retirement communities in Florida and the Southwest is another facet of the isolation of the aged...

...This equation is already implicit in the phrase "recreational sex," which recalls the more familiar "recreational drug use...

...Another explanation may be that King, a Catholic, is merely expressing his church's orthodoxy—which echoes the American uneasiness about sex...

...The elderly are subject to all the aches and pains and serious ailments of aging...

...Work" is a serious, socially responsible, and fatiguing activity that is rarely a source of pleasure...

...The assumption that procreation and "recreational sex" are the "only two reasons for sex" is one of those binary oppositions that pervade language...

...Consider, for example, a New York Times report of a change in policy that "will make it significantly more difficult for Medicare beneficiaries to obtain hearings in person before a judge when the government denies their claims for home care, nursing home services, prescription drugs and other treatments...

...There is an understandable tendency to shrug off King and others like him as examples of the excesses of right-wing ideology...

...But today's poor, like the poor of yesteryear, are still not "members of the community" like the rest of us...

...I don't mean to imply that King and Bush define Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries as undeserving in the style of eighteenthcentury self-righteousness—although there is an uncanny resemblance here to King's rhetoric...

...But when the requirements of work conflict with its seductive temptations, the latter must be sacrificed to the former: play must always give way to the claims of work...

...In his book The Undeserving Poor, Michael Katz writes, "We can think of the poor as 'them' or as 'us' . . . poor people usually remain outsiders, strangers to be pitied or despised, helped or punished, ignored or studied, but rarely full citizens, members of the larger community on the same terms as the rest of us...

...The implications of the president's rhetoric and policy proposals, however, have less to do with the moral failings of the elderly than with their status as "full citizens, members of the larger community...

...King's choice is obvious...

...By sheer coincidence, at the same time Bush was pushing for privatization of Social Security and King was denouncing the proposed Medicare benefit, American consumers were being warned on every shopping street and mall that St...

...it is much like providing gin to the indolent layabouts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...