Elon Musk’s laser-like focus on Social Security can be blamed on one thing, a columnist wrote Monday — a belief that retired people are a “parasitical” drain on the nation’s resources.
Musk thinks that retired people — whose working life is over — are now inefficient and should no longer be funded from the public purse, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte argued.
And that worldview is driving his ambition to slash the agency many of them are reliant on.
“Musk frames retired people in parasitical terms, not seeing them as those who have paid their dues and have earned their reward,” Marcotte wrote.
“In light of that, when he speaks of ‘waste’ in Social Security, he's hinting at this broader view that retired people are inherently illegitimate. While he couches language like ‘vampire’ and ‘fraud’ in false claims that he's talking about illegal payments, the accumulated impact of his rhetoric is to demonize elderly people as a useless burden on society.
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“When the end goal is ‘efficiency,’ it's easy to get to this view that retired people are an ‘inefficiency’ and ‘redundancy’ that should no longer be funded.”
Marcotte claimed that this “ugly attitude” is widely shared among the tech billionaire class.
She wrote that Musk’s worldview is that “human beings exist to serve the system,” with that system being capitalism. Retirees, as they’re no longer working, are out of the system and of use to it, she wrote.
“Causing people who have earned their Social Security to lose benefits doesn't look like an unintended consequence of ‘efficiency.’ It's becoming clear that it is Musk's end goal,” she concluded.
