WASHINGTON, DC, May 12 – Retired seniors and those who were planning to retire in the near future are scared that life as they knew it is threatened by the impact of the runaway Biden inflationary spiral that began climbing soon after he took office in January 2021. Back then, the rate of inflation stood at 1.4%; it is currently hovering at or above 8.4%.
Meanwhile, the retirement experts at the American Advisors Group [AAG] conducted a survey among 1,500 seniors between the ages of 60 and 75 about the impact of the skyrocketing inflationary levels and they found that:
- For many seniors, their financial supply is running out. Nearly one third [36%] of older Americans believe they will outlive their money…that they just don’t have enough money for retirement.
- 66% are worried that it will have a negative impact on their retirement
- 53% said the cost of living is higher than they expected
Perhaps the most disheartening finding was that fully 81% of respondents said they were fearful that their children and grandchildren won’t be able to retire comfortably. Why? Because if and when the causes of inflation are resolved, it’s unlikely sellers will bring their prices down. Laura Veldkamp, a professor of finance at Columbia Business School, put it this way: “When somebody sees that [for] their business the costs are too high, it’s become unprofitable — they’re pretty quick to recognize that and increase prices. But rarely does a person say, ‘Gosh, I’m making too much money. I better reduce those prices to solve that problem’.”
So, what does our president have to say for himself. His speech regarding inflation earlier this week was supposed to be about how he plans to deal with the debilitating inflation the nation faces. As Stuart Varney at Fox News put it, “instead of a policy, the president delivered a campaign speech. That’s all it was: just a set-up for November. A desperate attempt to blame and demonize the other side.” An ABC News report seems to corroborate Varney’s assessment: “The President’s speech at the White House was advertised by his advisers as being focused on his plan to fight inflation. While Biden did speak about inflation, he spent a significant amount of time attacking Republicans for a plan put out by the Senate GOP’s campaign arm than laying out any new policies that would reverse a series of troubling economic developments.”
While President Biden tries to cover up his missteps that led to the current inflation crisis, Senators Tim Scott [R-SC] and John Thune [R-SD] and at least nine other Senate Republicans seek to do what they can to deal with it. Their Inflation Prevention Act (IPA) is designed to help curb combat inflationary government spending. The bill would bar legislation that would be estimated to increase inflation until the year-over-year inflation rate drops below 4.5 percent. Marco Rubio [R-FL] describes the measure as “a few commonsense guardrails in place to curb reckless spending habits in Congress that threaten to create even more challenges for American families.”
Said Scott, “The truth is that President Biden’s economic policies have led to the worst inflationary effects in our economy in 40 years. That means that the average person in our country is experiencing an invisible tax that is eroding their spending power. That means that our seniors who are on a fixed income have to find a way to ration either their health care or their medicine, their energy, or food. It means that people who are growing up in households like the one I grew up in [are] now having to make harder decisions than they’ve ever had to make. That’s wrong.”