First, here are the titles of today's opinion pieces listed on the home page of the Washington Post:
- Boule: Republicans ambivalent on Romney
- Rubin: Romney-Ryan attack . . . on Medicare!
- Stromberg: Romney-Ryan cowardice on Medicare
- Milbank: Ryan almost as awkward as Romney
- Vanden Heuvel: Ryan is cruel, not courageous
- Lane: Actually, the elderly aren't at risk
- El-Erian: Paul Ryan and the 'new normal'
Fortunately, Lane's article gets away from the Romney-Ryan attacks and adds some good insight into the debate on Social Security (though Medicare is the real budget buster over the next fifty years).
We must never go back to the days when old age was a time of privation for the relative few who reached it. But as nightmare scenarios go, that one seems more remote than entitlement-driven national bankruptcy, given the stubborn and expensive fact that the over-65 population is on track to double in the next 40 years.
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Sooner or later, politicians are going to have to treat older voters not as potential victims but as secure and fortunate citizens, who can and should contribute their fair share to resolving the country’s fiscal predicament. In other words, to treat them as what they are.
And Lane is not against the elderly, as he notes at the beginning of his piece,
I hereby declare that I admire and like the elderly. My parents are elderly. I myself hope to be elderly someday, and to remain that way for a long time.
For those of you who remember the movie Shattered Glass, Chuck Lane was the editor of The New Republic when Glass was outed for fabricating stories. Lane eventually fired Glass, apparently against the wishes of his own staff who thought Glass just made a few mistakes and Lane was too harsh. Lane was proven right.
