With the election over we now have a future path. The country has voted and both on the basis of the popular vote and the electoral vote the Obama/Biden ticket is in.

The question for seniors is this: How will the issues which impact those 60 and older be impacted by a new Administration? And how about those who one day hope to be over age 60?

Over the next few days we’ll take a look at some of the core issues the new Obama Administration needs to address.

Today we’ll start with Social Security

According to the campaign’s official election site, BarackObama.com, we find the following ideas:

___Obama is against raising the retirement age. (With longer lifespans I’m not sure this one is carved in stone — as well, many people are simply working longer making this approach easier to keep than in the past.)

___Obama is strongly opposed to privatizing Social Security. Given the stock market swoon under Bush you can count on this one.

___Those making over $250,000 would be asked to contribute “a bit more” to Social Security “over many years.” The site also says “Obama does not support uncapping the full payroll tax of 12.4 percent rate. Instead, he and Joe Biden are considering plans that would ask those making over $250,000 to pay in the range of 2 to 4 percent more in total (combined employer and employee).”

Okay, “uncapped” means raising the payroll tax to 100 percent of what everyone makes while the increase being suggested here likely means a higher maximum than we have now. This is really the alternative approach to raising the retirement age.

One of the issues not address here is interest-based income. In other words, many people accumulated dollars over time in pension accounts with the idea of living off the interest and dividends. This retirement approach has now been destroyed for millions of people because pension values have fallen under the Bush Administration and interest rates and dividend payouts have plummeted. The result is fewer retirement dollars for seniors as well as smaller account balances.

The current situation seems virtually impossible to untangle because no one can force up pension values, increase dividends with companies that are losing money or increase interest rates if cheaper money is easily available. In essence, retirement accounts reflect the totality of the current economic situation, a situation which will take years to evolve.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 3:15 am and is filed under Topics for Seniors . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.