I Am the 99%

Probably I'm pretty well off, at least comparatively. I draw a government pension for my twenty-five years of work for the National Park Service. Since it's under the Civil Service Retirement System, it's outside Social Security, so when I reach retirement age I'll be able to "double dip" and collect a second benefit.

You might think that sounds rather cushy, or even vaguely immoral, but I have worked the forty quarters needed for Social Security after I left government service. Thanks to Congress' never ending battle against freeloaders like myself, my Social Security benefit will be reduced by between half and two-thirds, meaning I'll collect the grand sum of about $300 a month from them.

Meanwhile, although there have been cost of living adjustments to my government pension, the cost of health insurance premiums has risen faster, so today the purchasing power of my pension is somewhere between ten and twenty percent less than it was when I first started receiving it. I'm still employed, as I knew I would have to be, but without the largess of my mother-in-law, retirement would have been a pipedream.

Ten years after leaving graduate school, which I attended to take up a second career as a high school teacher, I'm still paying off student loans. (I wonder if I'm the oldest Anerican still paying these loans.)

But don't worry about me. Worry about all the other retirees who are barely scraping by, the working poor, single parents, those who are chronically ill, homeless veterans and the legion of people who are being nickeled and dimed to death by corporate America.

I am the 99% and am in solidarity with all of them.