“The 40-year trend has overwhelmingly moved in one direction: growth. In his new book, “ The Business of America Is Lobbying,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, provides insight into a crucial element of this power shift.īeginning in the early 1970s, just as support for redistribution began to decline, “corporate America began to devote attention and meaningful resources to politics,” Drutman writes. Rutledge and Anthony Webb, researchers at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, wrote in November 2014. “Our best assessment is that retirees are falling short and will fall increasingly short over time,” Alicia H.
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Seniors, a group unique in having guaranteed health insurance during our sample period, may increasingly feel that expansions of redistributive programs could come at their expense.įurther increasing anxiety among the aged in the United States is the shift from defined benefit pensions, which guarantee payments, to defined contribution pensions, which do not. This lends support to the authors’ conclusion that In most European countries, health care is guaranteed regardless of age, while in the United States, before the enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, only the elderly were guaranteed health coverage through Medicare.
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The decline in support among the elderly in the United States for redistributive social spending stands in contrast to Britain, Germany, Sweden and Australia where Ashok, Kuziemko and Washington found that older people were more supportive of redistribution than those of working age. Somewhat improbably, the administration also contends that cuts of this magnitude will not reduce services to Medicare beneficiaries. The Obama administration has reported that the Affordable Care Act will be financed in part by $716 billion in Medicare cuts over 10 years.