MY OLD MAN was talking old age pensions long before Dr. Townsend or any of those other fellows were ever heard of. My old man’s idea was that no man or woman should have to do a tap of work after they were 50 years of age.
Someone asked him why not 60 and he said, well, not enough people lived to be 60 and when they did, by that time, they were starting to think of the finish and had small capacity for fun left in them. He said that at 50 the average man and woman could feel that they still had a few years to go and he thought they ought to be fixed so they could put in those years enjoying themselves.
He said that at 50 the average man and woman had perhaps 30 years of hard scrabbling behind them and were entitled to knock off and take it easy the rest of their lives. In fact, his idea included a law that would make it a serious offense for any man or woman to engage in any occupation for hire after they were fifty.
My old man said that thus only young men and women would be working and they would be supporting their elders, and great happiness would pervade the land. He thought, however, that he would have a law prohibiting young persons from 21 upwards for males and from 18 for females from living with their parents or other older relatives, and he said he would make it a prison offense for such young persons borrowing from or in any way sponging on their elders.
My old man said that under his plan, the whole purpose of life in the United States would be to provide ease and pleasure for its citizens after 50, and he did not know but what he would have cities where only persons of that age or beyond might reside, in order to make sure that the young people did not horn in to boss them and spoil their fun.
He was a little hazy about how he would raise the money for this prodigious pensioning, because my old man had no small-time thoughts about the income that the pensioners would require to insure the ease and comfort that he had in mind for them. He thought that married couples should have at least $100 per week, and singles $50 per week, and all non-taxable.
Someone pointed out that in most cases this would be income far greater than that to which the pensioners were accustomed, and my old man said that was just it. He said they ought to have incomes far beyond that on which they had struggled to the home stretch of human existence, because they would then be enabled to enjoy themselves ten times more than they ever had before in their lives.
As stated, he was somewhat hazy about how he would raise the money for his prodigious pensioning. He did not talk it over with many citizens of our old home town of Pueblo, because not many citizens were entirely sympathetic toward his idea, but there was a bartender by the name of Dunn in Tommy Mathews' saloon who thought it was terrific.
So my old man would catch Dunn in the dull spells of the night watch, and they would discuss the matter at great length. Sometimes Bill Barr or Johnny Grund, the hack drivers, would drop in and add some valuable thoughts to the discussion.
My old man thought that a flat levy of ten per cent on every dollar earned and unearned income in the United States with no exemptions whatever, for a period of say twenty years, would create a nice nucleus for his pensioning, and from then on it would be automatic, with the young people working for the old from generation to generation.
Dunn argued that all fortunes beyond $1,000,000 should be confiscated and tossed into the jackpot, but my old man said no. He said let the rich go on getting richer, because the more they made the more they would have to give up to the pension fund. Besides, he said, they would be contributing to themselves, as it was no part of his idea to exclude anybody from pensioning just because they were rich, though they had the privilege of rejecting the pension.
My old man pointed out that under his plan we would have younger public officials, and younger industrial executives, and younger Army and Navy officers, and the like of that. He said he would not exempt even the President of the United States from retirement and pensioning at fifty. He said this would be a young people’s country, but it would also be an old people’s country.
He admitted that there might be some beefs about his plan from persons who might want to go on working after 50, but he said that in a couple of generations everybody would be accustomed to it, and would be looking forward in pleasant anticipation to the halfcentury mark, when they could stop work and start to play.
He was asked what about persons who never want to work at any age, and he said, well, pension them, too, because they would spend the money right away and keep it in circulation, and the young people would get hold of it again and back it would come to the old people. He said that was the way things worked in this world.
Doc Wilcox came in one night and listened to my old man’s plan, and he said it was all right but there was one drawback to it which was that it could not start the next day instead of waiting twenty years.