Yes, Biden Is Old - But Trump Is Old And Crazy!

It seems like all the talking heads on cable news want to talk about these days is President Biden's age. They go on and on about whether he has the mental faculties to serve well as president. 

The latest story about this is Special Counsel Hur's report on Biden finding some classified documents among his papers. While Hur cleared Biden of any wrongdoing, he added that the president seemed to have a memory problem -- saying "I don't remember" to some of the questions he was asked.

Frankly, I am shocked that the media is making such a big deal about that. Everyone has memory lapses, regardless of their age. There is no evidence that Biden has a problem. Both former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu say their recent meetings with Biden show he is competent, clear-headed, and knowledgable about current problems. Others in contact with President Biden say the same.

On the other hand, Donald Trump has said "I don't remember" over a thousand times in depositions and testimony. Where was the fear about Trump's memory? Did the media ignore it because they figured he was just lying (as he did over 30,000 times during his presidency)?

I'm not worried much about Biden's memory. He is surrounded by brilliant people who won't let him "forget" anything important. And more important than memory is empathy, experience, knowledge, and ability -- all of which Biden has in spades.

Both Biden and Trump are old (only three years difference in their ages), but Trump has some other worrying traits. He is authoritarian (wanting to use to Justice Department to punish his enemies and force Congress into compliance). He is a narcissist (who only cares about himself). He is a compulsive liar (who just says what he thinks his base wants to hear). And most worrying of all, he is preparing to people his staff with only sycophants (who will do his bidding even if its illegal or unconstitutional).

An ABC News / Ipsos Poll, done on February 9th and 10th of a small sample, showed that 59% of adults think both Biden and Trump are too old to be president. And there are small elements in both parties who would like to replace them with someone else.  That is not going to happen.

Barring an unforeseen tragedy to one or both, President Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be the nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties. It's time to shelve the whining and wishful thinking, and decide which would be best for our country and its democracy.

President Biden has done a good job. We need to stop worrying about his age and give him a new term in office.

Is The GOP Dying Off? It Looks That Way

(This photo image is from the Voice of America website.)

Much has been made of the fact that the Republican Party is mainly a party of Whites, and this country is fast becoming a nations where whites will be the minority. This doesn't bode well for the Republican Party -- but that is not the only problem they have. They also have an age problem. The average age of Republicans is much higher than for Democrats, and as older people die off, they are being replaced with young people who don't like the policies of the Republican Party (especially on social issues). This is important because political scientists have shown that people tend to stay all of their lives with the party they first voted for.

Here is how Daniel J. McGraw describes the Republican's age problem is an article for Think Progress:

It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies of the GOP and they might want to worry more about the former than the latter.

There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.

The party’s core is dying off by the day.

Since the average Republican is significantly older than the average Democrat, far more Republicans than Democrats have died since the 2012 elections. To make matters worse, the GOP is attracting fewer first-time voters. Unless the party is able to make inroads with new voters, or discover a fountain of youth, the GOP’s slow demographic slide will continue election to election. Actuarial tables make that part clear, but just how much of a problem for the GOP is this?

Since it appears that no political data geek keeps track of voters who die between elections, I took it upon myself to do some basic math. And that quick back-of-the-napkin math shows that the trend could have a real effect in certain states, and make a battleground states like Florida and Ohio even harder for the Republican Party to capture.

By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats.

Here is the methodology, using one age group as an example: According to exit polls, 5,488,091 voters aged 60 to 64 years old supported Romney in 2012. The mortality rate for that age group is 1,047.3 deaths per 100,000, which means that 57,475 of those voters died by the end of 2013. Multiply that number by four, and you get 229,900 Romney voters aged 60-to-64 who will be deceased by Election Day 2016. Doing the same calculation across the range of demographic slices pulled from exit polls and census numbers allows one to calculate the total voter deaths. It’s a rough calculation, to be sure, and there are perhaps ways to move the numbers a few thousand this way or that, but by and large, this methodology at least establishes the rough scale of the problem for the Republicans—a problem measured in the mid-hundreds of thousands of lost voters by November 2016. To the best of my knowledge, no one has calculated or published better voter death data before.

“I’ve never seen anyone doing any studies on how many dead people can’t vote,” laughs William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic studies. “I’ve seen studies on how many dead people do vote. The old Daley Administration in Chicago was very good at that.”

Frey points out that, since Republicans are getting whiter and older, replacing the voters that leave this earth with young ones is essential for them to be competitive in presidential elections. But the key question is whether these election death rates will make any real difference. There are so many other variables that dead voters aren’t necessarily going to be a decisive factor.

“The [GOP] does rely too much on older and white voters, and especially in rural areas, deaths from this group can be significant,” Frey says. “But millennials (born 1981 to 1997) now are larger in numbers than baby boomers ([born] 1946 to 1964), and how they vote will make the big difference. And the data says that if Republicans focus on economic issues and stay away from social ones like gay marriage, they can make serious inroads with millennials.”

But what if Republicans aren’t able to win over a larger share of the youth vote? In 2012, there were about 13 million in the 15-to-17 year-old demo who will be eligible to vote in 2016. The previous few presidential election cycles indicate that about 45 percent of these youngsters will actually vote, meaning that there will about 6 million new voters total. Exit polling indicates that age bracket has split about 65-35 in favor of the Dems in the past two elections. If that split holds true in 2016, Democrats will have picked up a two million vote advantage among first-time voters. These numbers combined with the voter death data puts Republicans at an almost 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016.

The GOP Would Deny Income To Retirees By Raising The Age To Qualify For Social Security Benefits

These charts were made from information provided by the Gallup Poll between 2002 and 2014. The latest survey being done between April 3rd and 6th of 1,026 randomly chosen nationwide adults (and has a margin of error of 4 points). Previous years would be similar.

I found it interesting that the difference between expected retirement and actual retirement was significantly different. As a young or even middle aged person, we all expect to have a long work life & don't particularly expect or want to retire early. But life intervenes, and changes those expectations to realities.

Why do people retire earlier than they expect to? A few just meet their goals, and retire to enjoy the money they have made -- but they are a tiny minority. Others are forced into retirement because their employer just wants to replace them with a younger and cheaper employee. But the majority of early retirees must do so because of either illness or their bodies are just not capable of performing physical labor any more.

The Republicans in Congress have said for years now that the retirement age for receiving Social Security benefits should be raised to age 70. And a roundtable of corporate executives recently agreed with them. But they are not considering what happens to workers in the real world. Workers who spend their lives without doing any physical labor (politicians, bankers, corporate executives, hedge fund managers, Wall Street brokers, etc.) could probably work until age 70, because they have not had to put daily physical demands on their bodies.

But there are millions of Americans workers (miners, oil field workers, construction workers, farm workers, etc.) who must do hard physical labor every day of their working lives, and it is just not right to expect them to continue doing that kind of work until age 70. While most would love to continue working, their bodies will just not let them do that. Whether we want to admit it or not, a 55 or 60 year old just cannot do the same physical labor they could do at 25 or 30 years old. People who spend their lives doing hard physical labor will have to retire earlier than a person who has not.

And that is the main thing that's wrong with the GOP's desire to raise the retirement age. It would force many physical laborers who have to retire to go years without any income before they could apply for Social Security -- making them have to rely on family members for support, or forcing them into a homeless and penniless situation. And that's a terrible thing to happen to a person that worked hard for their entire lives (until their bodies could no longer do it).

It is just these type of people who the Social Security program was created for -- hard workers who, through no fault of their own, can no longer work. Raising the retirement age would throw these people into poverty (which Social Security was designed to prevent) -- and it's a heartless solution designed to keep the rich from having to pay the same percentage in FICA taxes that these workers pay all of their working lives.

There is no legitimate reason to raise the retirement age, or to cut any Social Security benefits. Any problems the Social Security system has (which will not show up for another 20 years) can easily be fixed by raising or eliminating the cap on income subject to FICA taxes. And personally, I don't see why the rich shouldn't be paying the same FICA tax percentage as middle class and poor workers have to pay.

GOP Attacks Clinton As Being Too Old

It is pretty clear to anyone who keeps up with politics that if Hillary Clinton wants the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, it is hers for the asking. And it is equally clear that her popularity with the American public far exceeds that of any current GOP presidential prospect. That is why the GOP has been attacking Hillary and trying to put a dent in her popularity.

They first tried to do that by making people believe that Clinton was somehow responsible for the tragedy in Benghazi. But that "scandal" turned out to be more of a Republican scandal than a Democratic one, since the congressional Republicans cut millions of dollars for embassy security (even though Secretary of State Clinton had begged them to increase the funding for security).

When that didn't work, they had to come up with something new to attack her on -- and it looks like some of the top Republicans have decided she is too old for the job. Stuart Stevens (top Romney strategist) said it would be like going back in time, Mitch McConnell (minority leader in Senate) called it a "rerun of 'The Golden Girls'", and Karl Rove says "we're at the end of her generation". Even Scott Walker (GOP governor of Wisconsin) got into the act by claiming a younger candidate would be better "if you want to keep thinking about tomorrow".

It doesn't take a genius to decipher what they are saying -- Hillary Clinton is too old to be elected president. Now this could be ageism, the belief that older citizens are somehow less qualified than others, but I doubt it (since many of them are as old as she is). It could also be sexism, the idea that men (even older men) are better qualified than women, and there is probably some of that (since the Republicans seem determined to keep women in a second-class citizenship status). After all, Ronald Reagan was the same age when he ran for president as Hillary will be in 2016 (69 years old) -- and they certainly didn't think he was too old!

But I think the main reason they are trying to float the "too old" argument is they are scared crapless at the thought of a Hillary Clinton candidacy. They know they would have little to no chance of defeating her in a fair election (which is also why they are celebrating the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and now quickly acting to restrict as many people as possible from being able to vote).

In short, the Republicans see their path to victory in future elections lies in demagoguery and cheating -- since they refuse to change their policies to appeal to a majority of American voters. And Hillary could probably even win in spite of those odious GOP efforts.

The "Life Expectancy" Lie

One of the things the congressional Republicans (and their Wall Street masters) are pushing these days is that the age of qualifying for Medicare (and possibly even Social Security) should be raised. The age to qualify for full Social Security benefits has already been raised from65 to 66, and some in Congress want it raised even further. While the age for Medicare qualification is still 65, the congressional GOP wants to raise it to 67 -- and they are holding the middle class tax cuts as hostage to try and force the president (and congressional Democrats) to go along with that.

One of the main arguments for raising the age of qualification for both programs is the idea that life expectancy has increased in this country, and that would be true. The general life expectancy for Americans has increased, but the harsh fact is that for some it has increased a lot and for others it has not increased at all -- meaning that the average, which is used to further the right-wing argument, is pretty useless when it comes to individual needs.

The above chart, compiled from data in a 2007 Social Security bulletin, begins to get at the real truth about life expectancy. As the chart shows, the life expectancy for the top half of income earners in this country (who tend to have less physically-demanding jobs) rose by 6 or 7 years between 1977 and 2007. But the rise in life expectancy for the bottom half of this country's income earners (who usually have far more physically-demanding jobs) barely rose at all, averaging only about 1 year. 

While raising the qualification age might make sense for the top income earners in the U.S., these are not the people who need Social Security and Medicare the most. In fact, many of them don't need these programs at all. But lower wage earners, who do need these programs, would be seriously hurt by raising the qualification age. In other words, raising the age to qualify for either of these programs would just hurt the people who need those programs the most. 

Decline Of Religion In The U.S.

The above figures are derived from a massive Gallup Poll conducted between January 2nd and November 30th of this year of 326,721 adults (18 and older) chosen randomly from across the nation. The huge number of respondents gives the poll a very high degree of accuracy, with a margin of error of only 1 point.

While the poll shows that 69% of the American population is either moderately or very religious, the really shocking statistic is the third one -- that 31% of the population is not religious at all. That is a very high number -- even higher than the results from a recent Pew Research Center Poll, which found the number of the nonreligious to be about 20% (although growing faster than any other religious group). That means at least 3 out of every 10 people in the U.S. is either an atheist, agnostic, or otherwise has no religion.

Now the only thing this proves is that the United States is becoming less and less religious as time passes. But amazingly, the author of a new book (God Is Alive And Well: The Future Of Religion In America) takes these figures (and others dating back to polls as old as 2008) to reach the conclusion that religion is on the verge of making a big comeback in this country.

The author bases this conclusion on the ideas that the most religious age group is the one composed of people over 65 years old, and that people get more religious as they age -- and since the large group of "baby boomers" are starting to enter that age group that means the percentage of the religious will increase. The first premise is true. The current crop of elderly people are the most religious age group. The Pew Research Center found the following percentages of nonreligious people by age group:

Born 1913 to 1927...............5%
Born 1928 to 1945...............9%
Born 1946 to 1964...............15%
Born 1965 to 1980...............21%
Born 1981 to 1989...............30%
Born 1990 to 1994...............34%

But while the oldest couple of groups do have the lowest percentage of the nonreligious, we must take into account that they were born into (and grew up in) a much different America -- a much more religious America. This group didn't necessarily become more religious as they aged -- they were always more religious than the age groups that came after them.

The author seems to be basing his belief on people growing more religious as they start to face death, but there is no proof that happens in any significant numbers. It's much like the old christian idea that "there are no atheists in foxholes" (that people run toward a belief in god if faced with possible death). But as we know, there are plenty of atheists in foxholes -- and the danger they face does not make them accept a god they discarded after much lengthy thought.

The fact is that most atheists and agnostics gave up the myth of a god after a lengthy and painful period of soul-searching -- and there is no reason (other than religious wishful thinking) to believe they will abandon their non-belief just because they are getting older. Of course there is always some movement between non-belief and belief (people changing their minds), but there is no reason to believe this will favor religious belief in a significant way. In fact, both the Gallup and Pew polls seem to show just the opposite -- that the larger numbers of people are moving away from a belief in god and organized religion.

Another reason that could inhibit the movement of people back toward religion was released in another recent Gallup Poll. This poll surveyed the publics attitudes on which professions were considered to be honest and ethical by most people. Somewhat surprisingly, the clergy did not do real well in that -- with only 53% of Americans considering the clergy (whether protestant, catholic, or other) to be honest and ethical. That's an even lower number than the percentage of people who consider themselves religious -- meaning that even many religious people have serious doubts about the honesty of the clergy.

The baby boomers are already reaching the age of 65, and we will soon know if that makes them more religious. I don't believe it will.

Old People Are Generally Happier

Thanks largely to the post-World War II baby boom and advances in medical care (including Medicare), our nation is aging quickly. With each passing year, the median age in the United States rises. As one of those "baby boomers", I found this study very interesting.

Ours is a youth-oriented society, and many people look upon growing old as a terrible thing. They worry about growing older, and view old age as a time of ill health, less income, less social status and loss of close friends. But while that may be true, a Stanford University psychologist has discovered that older people are generally happier than young people.

Dr. Laura Carstensen "asked volunteers ranging in age from 18 to mid-90s to take part in various experiments and keep diaries of their emotional state." The results of her study are interesting. She found that older people did not experience nearly as many persistent negative moods as younger people did, and took personal criticism much better. They were also better at controlling their emotions (a skill that seems to improve with age).

Dr. Susan Charles of the University of California puts it this way, "Based on work by Carstensen and her colleagues, we know that older people are increasingly aware that the time they have left in life is growing shorter. They want to make the best of it so they avoid engaging in situations that will make them unhappy. They have also had more time to learn and understand the intentions of others which helps them to avoid these stressful situations."

I have to agree with this. I am a much happier person than I used to be when I was younger. A large part of it came when I decided a few years ago that I was too old to care what other people thought or said about me.

The years (and a partially mis-spent youth) have also given me a wealth of experience. It is easier to pick out and avoid those situations that are likely to result in a negative consequence. I guess the old wive's tale about wisdom coming with age is at least partially true.

I gues the point is to not fret about growing older. As with youth, it has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is being happier. Personally, I like being happier.