Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan, among other issues, campaigned in favor of making Social Security and Medicare (Crown Jewels of the New Deal & The Great Society) voluntary. I was just beginning my career and it would have made quite a difference to me in the amount of money I saved each year toward my nest egg. Reagan made the point that people who had contributed to those programs for years would still get what was coming to them. The Democrats fought tooth and nail against those dishonestly-enacted Ponzi schemes and demagogued the issues to the oldsters who, in those days, gave them many votes. Reagan eventually had to throw in the towel.

Forty years later and now my friends and I, forced to count on those programs as significant components of a hoped -for retirement, and the same Democratic Party and their media presstitutes want to scale them way back. And why wouldn’t they advocate for the the sacrifice of seniors in this era, when most of us oldsters skew to the right, tend to vote Republican, and, not insignificantly, like Donald Trump and the candidates who are not afraid to identify with him.