AARP is fighting harder than any organization in America to ensure that the lives of the nation’s youth will be miserable.
If the United States continues on its current fiscal trajectory, by the time children born today reach their mid 20s, the national debt will have tripled from its already inflated levels, reaching a staggering 185 percent of gross domestic product.
At that point, if the U.S. theoretically devoted its entire economic output toward paying off the debt, it would take nearly two years to do so.
Everybody who has taken a closer look at the budget knows that the primary driver of this looming fiscal nightmare is spending on the nation’s entitlements — primarily Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But for decades, lawmakers have deferred action, and no organization has done more to block reform efforts than AARP.
While AARP frequently pays lip service to the idea of addressing these fiscal challenges, the reality is that it has countered every serious attempt to fix them by scaring seniors.
The group led the opposition in 2005 against President Bush’s plan to create voluntary personal Social Security accounts for younger workers and worked to ensure that President Obama didn’t adopt any of the recommendations from his own fiscal commission.
The organization is helped by its innocuous and harmless seeming image. Most Americans think of AARP as the group that provides hotel discounts to old people.
Yet the House Ways and Means committee will convene a hearing Friday examining the finances of AARP, which enjoys tax-exempt non-profit status even though its for-profit insurance arm rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Though it bills itself as a non-partisan group representing the interests of 40 million Americans over 50, the reality is far different. Over the past three election cycles (2006-2010), contributions from individuals who named AARP as their employer went 95 percent to Democrats, according to an analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics. This doesn’t include the $8,900 the group’s CEO, Barry Rand, contributed to Obama before he joined AARP.
The only way AARP can be classified as bipartisan is that it supports the expansion of government no matter which party is initiating it. And a bigger government is good for business.
During the Bush administration, AARP endorsed the Medicare prescription drug plan, which helped it nearly triple its insurance royalty revenue, from $240 million in 2002 to $657 million by 2009.
Despite polls consistently showing older Americans more opposed to Obama’s national health care plan than any other age group, AARP lobbied for it. The group could stand to rake in an additional $166 million in 2014 alone as a result of the law, according to a House GOP report released ahead of the hearing.
In real terms, continuing on the current fiscal path means that America’s youth will experience a substantially worse standard of living than their elders. They will be punished with stagnant growth, high unemployment, crushing tax rates, and runaway inflation.
Additionally, U.S. military strength will deteriorate substantially,making the nation more vulnerable.
The only way of preventing this outcome is to fundamentally reform the nation’s broken entitlement system. And the first step toward doing that is to take on AARP.
Philip Klein is senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner.
