PLATFORM : Independent Living

Reducing the incomes of middle-class elderly should be a last resort if it would also reduce their financial ability to live by themselves. Maybe young people need to be reminded of the aging people who face extended nursing-home care or costly retirement “homes” because their younger relatives dislike the thought of taking them in.

Aging well seems to depend on a combination of personal and social factors. Psychologist James Birren holds that after losing the props that sustained their old identities, many elderly can’t re-establish their sense of self-importance or create a new identity.

The elderly already have much to contend with. To portray them as greedy parasites because some of them are living better than the younger people who are being taxed just as they were when they were young is a grievous injustice. Laws can be rewritten so that the very wealthy forgo some entitlement benefits. But leave the middle-class elderly alone--or else provide them with the social and psychological nourishment they need by again welcoming them into family circles.