Related to the food issue is the idea in the US of raising the eligibility age for SS and Medicare. Some keep talking about people living longer and lots of bullpucky as to how 65 is the new 50 or whatever.
Seems they keep forgetting about the increasing obesity...diabetes...blood pressure...etc rates in the US. In my immediate experience...a lot of boomers will be lucky to make 70...let alone early 80s.
The downlow on SS and Medicare?
The Great Social Security Robbery
The leaders of both major parties, Congress, the White House, the editorial writers, journalists of all the principle newspapers and most academic economists claim that Social Security and Medicare need to be ‘reformed’ in order to reduce the “unsustainable” fiscal deficit and avoid the bankruptcy of these social programs. An important aspect of this elite propaganda campaign is the perverse manipulation of the nature of those two programs. They are dubbed “entitlement programs”, implying some sort of government handout or individual privilege. In fact social security is a form of social insurance paid for through payroll tax deductions throughout the working life of the contributors, which usually approximates a half-century.
The “entitlement” rhetoric claims that the lifetime contributions are insufficient and that several regressive ‘reforms’ are necessary to “save the systems” – at the expense of the beneficiaries. The so-called “Grand Compromise” proposed by President Obama and the “Fiscal Reforms” proposed by the Congressional Republicans are all aimed at robbing working class contributors of their pension savings through various specific regressive changes.
The “Grand Compromise” as Legalized Theft
For decades only a small fraction of Social Security contributions are used to pay recipients, the bulk is transferred into the general treasury to pay for current expenditures – mostly hundreds of billions of dollars in war spending, payments on bonds and T-notes; subsidies to agro-business, bailouts to Wall Street speculative investment banks and other elite economic interests. Over the decades the Treasury robbed several trillions in SS funds, exchanging them for IOUs (never reimbursed) in order to provide a kind of “social insurance” for the military-industrial-Wall Street-police state power elite. If the accumulated payments to SS had remained in a special account instead of being siphoned off to cover the deficits incurred by military spending and overseas wars, SS finance would be in sound condition at least till the end of the 21st century. The Social Security Administration (SSA) would be able to adjust payments upward to real rates of inflation (about double the rate of adjustment now jiggered by the Government). The SSA could begin full payments at age 62 for most and at a lower age for those citizens working in hazardous occupations.
Even if we take account of the past Treasury heist, the SS fund could be fully replenished if the cap was eliminated on incomes above $110,000 and if the SS tax was made progressive. As is well known, self-employed billionaires and millionaires pay an average of $11,450 a year to the SS fund. If the cap was lifted, those earning a billion would pay a minimum of $100 million a year at the current rate, the millionaires $100 thousand a year. If a moderately progressive rate was in place, payments would double, pretty much ending the threat to SS.
There is no “entitlement crises” today. There is a crisis in the regressive payments and tax systems which finance the social insurance programs. The problem is elite tax evasion not the ‘aging of the population’. The problem is the use of SS payments to fund the power elite-robbing Peter (SS) to pay Paul (imperial wars).
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Like taking candy from a baby? 
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