Buckley’s Corner: Entitled to Death and Taxes

(Editor’s Note: This is an ongoing series dedicated to sharing and explicating the writing of William F. Buckley Jr.)

Jay recently hosted Kevin Williamson on Nordlinger’s Q & A podcast, wherein the two discussed the unpleasant reality of our having no money while fixing to spend trillions per year on entitlements (Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare), with no adjustment in sight.

Buckley’s 1996 article “Life in the Nineties” considers the broader ramifications of unremarkable, interminable senescence:

I long ago noted an article by James Michener in the New York Times making the point that longevity would become the primary social problem of the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first.

We became friends, and walking together the ten-block distance from the press hotel in Beijing to the Great Hall of the People on a cold day in February 1972, to witness President Nixon’s celebratory opening of the gates to China, I asked Michener how old he was. Sixty-five, he said.

Twenty-four years later — last week — I have a card from him. It is a printed message. It says merely that he would not wish his friends to think he had forgotten about them.

It is so with the very old, the problem of staying in touch. I was encouraged by his family to telephone Malcolm Muggeridge on his eighty-fifth birthday. He acknowledged in a light, hoarse voice his pleasure at my calling, and then said: “You know, I will not write to you. I am too old.”

What are we to make of the diehards? In the last short season I have been closely in touch with four men and women who are more than ninety years old.

One of them was for twenty years the editor of the weekly with the largest circulation in the world. I dined with him in Paris a fortnight ago, and he reiterated his single sorrow, that his (beloved) wife had died before
him.

The most touching of all the Greek legends tells of Philemon and Baucis, who though old and destitute admitted into their cottage and nourished a god who came to their door posing as a beggar. In due course Zeus revealed himself, irradiating sparks of Olympian divinity, and announced that in return for their disinterested charity they could request of him any favor they chose. There was one only wish, said Philemon: that when the time came they should die simultaneously. With a gentle stroke of his caduceus, the god transformed the aged couple into two trees, whose branches fondled one another in winter, their leaves nestling in the spring.

. . .

My friend in Paris is jubilant about his material arrangements: He has what they term a reverse mortgage. You deed your house/apartment to a bank. That bank pays your taxes, maintains your property, pays the maid and the cleaning woman. When you die, the house is the bank’s. The bank wins if you pull out early; it loses if you go on and on. My friend told me about a Parisian woman who had made such an arrangement at age seventy-six and lived to age 121, having impoverished her late banker. There are those who believe that suicide –euthanasia — is not the right answer, tempting though it can be. How much of life did Cynthia Koestler deprive herself of, in her act of love?

But James Michener’s premonition is correct. Old age is the looming problem of the civilization that has discovered the keys to longevity.

Simply put, people aren’t dying like they used to. We Americans (known for our happy corpulence) are retiring far earlier than we’re dying, and so the math that made the entitlement programs sort of work at their inception is buggered. Further complicating the issue is, as Kevin points out, the fact that all strata of income levels are wrapped up in the scheme — meaning that there isn’t a group cut out and willing to do away with the system. Instead, there’s a (vastly overcompensated) rapidly aging bulk of the population that paid into a system they expect to rely on in retirement:

At the same time, those younger than them expect nothing but calamity as we subsidize our elders’ retirements, with little hope that such generosity will exist for us.