9 million elderly at risk of an empty pantry...,

usatoday | About twice a week, when the arthritis in her legs allows it, Judy Slover rises in her one-bedroom apartment at the Rug Mill Towers in Freehold and makes the six-block trek on foot to the food pantry here, Freehold Area Open Door.Sometimes the walk takes a half-hour, sometimes more, all depending on how much pain she feels, she says.

At Open Door, she picks up bread and pasta, apples and oranges, onions and potatoes, maybe some frozen chicken and hamburger; thanks the volunteers; then journeys home. Some days, she can't make the trip at all, says Slover, 60, who also copes with diabetes and depression.

"I've been homeless," she said. "I have no support team. They call me the bag lady, but I gotta do what I gotta do, you know? Nobody's been there for me but Open Door."

Slover is among about 9 million people 50 and older living at risk of going hungry every day, a 79% increase in a decade, according to the AARP.

As they desperately fall behind even more in the wake of job losses and obliterated retirement investments and savings, advocates say it will take more aggressive and creative approaches to help the nation's eldest citizens get food on the table.

Carlos Rodriguez, executive director of the FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, says there are multiple reasons for the rise in seniors' food insecurity: unexpected expenses and investment losses can bring those on fixed incomes to the brink of financial disaster, he said.

"So many households have to make choices between paying for utilities, paying for housing or putting food on the table," Rodriguez said. "Seniors have perhaps the added expense — 'Do I take care of my prescription drug or health needs?'"

As a result of the escalating problems, senior health and social services agencies have turned their sights to supplying food; likewise, anti-hunger organizations have turned their sights to seniors. But obstacles to those efforts range from budget cuts to seniors' own reluctance to accept help, organizers say.

The Meals on Wheels Association of America delivered 241 million meals nationwide in 2010 with the support of federal funds, but proposed budget cuts to the Older Americans Act could bring that figure down to about 219 million for senior nutrition programs — a reduction of 22 million meals from 2010, said Meals on Wheels spokeswoman Mary McNamara. That's before a proposed 8.2% across-the-board cut via sequestration that organizers estimate could result in the loss of an extra 17 million meals served nationwide.

And last year, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — also known as the food stamp program — in the United States spent $7.4 billion more than it did the year before. A House vote on a farm bill that would cut $16 billion from the program is awaiting a vote after the November elections, legislators say.

parasitic gerontocracy..,

Esquire | Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.

In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.

This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time, everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.

Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you're a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.

The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn't mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here's Rubio: "Americans chose a free-enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home." He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in 2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.

David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party's combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: "This isn't conservatism: It's a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation." The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.

Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama's 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.

His intentions may be good — he may want to increase support for AmeriCorps — but the program shrunk last year. Three quarters of the applicants were turned away. He resisted Republican efforts to slash Pell grants by $845 per student, but then made other changes to the program that will save the government — or cost students, depending on your perspective — a projected $100 billion over ten years.

The youth vote still supports Obama, but in a chastened, conditional way. In hindsight, Obama's 2008 campaign looks like an indulgent fantasy in which the major conflicts in life simply don't exist. There may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don't form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, "The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget."

The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers' deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there's just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety. Fist tap Arnach.