An Associated Press article that ran in this morning’s Portland Press Herald is titled Wealth Gap Widest Ever Between Young, Old and goes on to have what I think is an amazing subhead: young adults bear the brunt of the economic downturn while the federal safety net buoys retirees. Really, you have to read the article. Let me know if you’re as completely annoyed as I was!

Essentially, the article states that the huge and growing gap between wealth held by those over 65 and wealth held by those under 35 is somehow the fault of our seniors, because they held jobs, saved money, and paid off their mortgages.

The wealth difference was highlighted in a recent report. From the article: 

The report, coming out before the Nov. 23 deadline for a special congressional committee to propose $1.2 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years, casts a spotlight on a government safety net that has buoyed older Americans on Social Security and Medicare amid wider cuts to education and other programs, including cash assistance for poor families.

“It makes us wonder whether the extraordinary amount of resources we spend on retirees and their health care should be at least partially reallocated to those who are hurting worse than them,” said Harry Holzer, a labor economist and public policy professor at Georgetown University who called the magnitude of the wealth gap “striking.”

Like all averages, the average in the article is deceptive. To get a median net worth in households of people 65 and over of $170,494, there have to be lots of people below that level. And to be honest, a median net worth of $3,662 in households headed by 35 year olds probably does reflect college debt and sometimes upside-down mortgages, but those debts are choices made on on the premise that jobs would be available and housing would increase in value.

What’s really scary is that senior care in Maine costs around $6,500 a month on average in assisted living. So even if your household does have a net value of $170,000, that’s only a few months over two years of senior care. $170,000 is just not that much!

And as far as the federal safety net buoying seniors, many of those programs have been cut repeatedly in the past few years, and MaineCare (Medicaid) hasn’t paid the full cost of care for years now, leaving doctors, nursing homes, private pay residents and hospitals to cover the gap.

In all, the article is a bit inflamatory, somehow making seniors the bad guys, the fat cats, the selfish horders. Untrue and unfair.