Elderly Poverty Quotes

The government, of course, will print money to bail out the banks' uncovered casino bets, but not to bail out the elderly from the theft of their funds.

Medicare is paid for by the American taxpayer. Medicare belongs to you. Medicare is for seniors, who many of them are on fixed income, to lift them out of poverty.

The Polish society is not composed solely of entrepreneurial and energetic young people. I can't image pensioners who get 600 zlotkies or 800 zlotkies a month getting even less than that. That would be immoral.

Without Social Security benefits, more than 40 percent of Americans 65 years and older would live below the federal poverty line. Even more striking is that Social Security is the only source of retirement income for almost a quarter of elderly beneficiaries.

I am a huge admirer of Franklin Roosevelt's, and I believe social security has done untold good in alleviating the once-widespread issue of poverty among the elderly. FDR believed in the greatness and generosity of Americans - but he was also a cold-blooded politician.

I agree with President Roosevelt, and generations since, that American seniors deserve better than poverty.

When the average Social Security benefit is $1328 a month, and more than one-third of our senior citizens rely on Social Security for Virtually all of their income, our job is to expand benefits, not cut them.

When you have a senior citizen who can't afford her prescription medicine, Washington is broken.

As a result of the current universal benefit, the poverty rate for seniors in America is about 10%. Without the universal benefit, it would be over 50%.

Among seniors, Social Security is the sole source of income for 26 percent of nonmarried women.

The most common cause of fear of old age is associated with the possibility of poverty.

There is a sort of indifference to the problem of old age. Indifference in the face of a revolution in longevity.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

Old age is not a good thing. It can be really hard, and those of us who have it a little easier should keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are not as well off.

Age-based retirement arbitrarily severs productive persons from their livelihood, squanders their talents, scars their health, strains an already overburdened Social Security system, and drives many elderly people into poverty and despair. Ageism is as odious as racism and sexism.

Without federal assistance, most elderly Americans would be unable to afford long-term care - and most nursing homes would be unable to keep the doors open.

The thing you've got to watch for is going broke when you're old. Look at all the people that go down and out at the finish. The man who built my country place is blind now and penniless. That's terrible!

Before Social Security existed, about half of America's senior citizens lived in poverty.

There are many Asian-Americans who are living in poverty, especially our senior citizens.

If the experts are right in their calculations, then we face the prospect of millions of people retiring into poverty from the American middle class in the years ahead. That has all kinds of social and economic consequences. We need to anticipate those and start tackling the problem in a constructive way.

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in their old age.

Many Americans are unaware that we still have a large population of working families, elderly, and children who rely on emergency food pantries, shelters, and other resources to meet their nutritional needs.

If we didn't have Social Security, our seniors would live mostly in poverty. You'd have another 18 million people in poverty.

Research by James Poterba at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that the wealth of the U.S.'s elderly is highly skewed. About half of retirees have little or no financial wealth when they retire and depend almost entirely on Social Security for their income.

Retirement shouldn't be making the choice between buying much-needed medication or putting food on the table; making the choice between heating an apartment in the cold winter months or paying rent; making the choice between paying a phone bill or seeing a doctor.