Baby boomers with no place to call home

[eridani]

Coming of age during major recessions followed by recoveries that added lots of jobs was a major disaster for this demographic. What is in store in another 30 years for people now coming of age during recessionary periods in which NO NEW JOBS have been added?

This is why Social Security and Medicare will be more necessary than ever. Scrap the fucking cap and make the 1% sociopaths pay their fair share!

http://www.pressherald.com/news/baby-boomers_2013-01-06.html

Shelters are seeing a surge in older men with age-related illnesses, a trend that could have implications for how we shape public policy.

Charles Jones sleeps every night in the Oxford Street Shelter’s “medical dorm,” so called because the room is reserved for up to 16 men in poor health.

Jones, who first became homeless five years ago after a bank foreclosed on his Belfast farm, suffers from degenerative disc disease and mental health problems that emerged after he lost the farm. He says he’s seeing more and more people in the shelter who, like him, also struggle with health issues.

“It’s the older folks,” he says. “The older generation is growing.”

<snip>

Some of the men who come to the shelter are being discharged directly from hospitals. In the five-month period between June 1 and Nov. 30, 2012, a total of 142 people at the Oxford Street Shelter reported having been discharged from hospitals, including Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital in Portland, and Spring Harbor, a psychiatric hospital in Westbrook.

The shelter’s medical dorm didn’t exist a year and a half ago, but is now full. To keep up with demand, O’Brien last week went to Scarborough to buy five more cots at Cabela’s, a hunting supply store. The shelter now has 39 cots set aside for people who are too sick to sleep on floor mats.

Culhane says many of the chronic homeless are young baby boomers who came of age during the back-to-back recessions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Older baby boomers had taken the best, highest-paying jobs, and housing supply was tightening, he says.

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[Berlum]

2. Winter of age is the time for home

[HiPointDem]

3. what does wh auden have to do with this story?

[Berlum]

4. To ask the hard question is simple

This is the age of anxiety

[Madmiddle]

5. The thing is

the rest of the worlds isn't becoming like us, we are becoming like the rest of the world.

[LiberalElite]

6. Divide & conquer

"...Older baby boomers had taken the best, highest-paying jobs..." Well just put us out on the ice floes while there still are some.

[gkhouston]

7. Probably more accurate to say that good jobs were already starting to disappear. n/t

[Berlum]

10. The Republican-engineered birth of the New Millenium American Prole class

?w=540

[southernyankeebelle]

8. So like generations before us we did what was expected of us to do. Go to work, earn

a living to raise a family and then you are suppose to retire with a pension from a job and help with social security that you put into. Medicare is suppose to kick in at 65. We ask for no handouts. Instead what happen you had Corporations who are taking away your pensions and people are left to live on social security. Many people had 401ks. They did everything right and in the end got screwed. So where are these people suppose to go to when they get old. In the old country your children took care of their elderly parents when things went down hill. Here being old in america in a way is a curse. Their grown children can barely take care of their immediate family. That is why social security and medicare were put in place. I honestly don't know what I would do if I were married. I don't even make $1,000 a month. I couldn't depend on my son because they are having a hard time trying to make a living. Many people don't care about the elderly. We should respect the elderly like they do in Japan and many Oriental families do. I dunno what is going to happen to people who are falling threw the cracks. The congress wants to raise the age of medicare and social security when we should be leaving it what it is or lowering the age. I guess the difference between republicans who think medicare and social security isn't a right while dems believe they are a right.

[fasttense]

11. I listened to Thom Hartmann last night.

A gentleman from a red state called in. He said that the elderly in the red states don't understand that when RepubliCONS say they are going to take away entitlements or reform entitlements, it means RepubliCONS want to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. The elderly in red states who keep voting for nasty RepubliCONS think of entitlements as welfare for minorities. They don't think it means RepubliCONS are going to take away their Social Security and Medicare too. Fox noise never explains what entitlement reform means so the low information voters in red states think their Social Security or Medicare wont get cut.

[southernyankeebelle]

12. Your right. I know my daughter-in-laws grandparents live on social security and food stamps.

She and her husband both are on medicare. That is the only healthcare they have. She has a heart condition and all she was doing was praying she would make it to 65 for medicare. Yet both of them voted republicans. They are nice people but poor educated. They should be dems but they voted republican in her whole family. They always jump on my daughter-in-law because she voted dem. They hate the black man in the white house. I don't know if they are natural republicans or republicans because the black man in the white house. How sick are people to vote against their financial interest. You can't talk to these people. You try to tell them but they are stuck on stupid or something. I've given up trying to talk with them. They believe what fox tells them.

[cer7711]

9. Scrap the Cap!

ALL income should be subject to taxes that help fund Social Security.