Elderly and poor

"Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value." — President Joe Biden

If Biden looked at the budgets of about half of older Americans, he could tell they value simply hanging on. Data from the University of Massachusetts-Boston shows that more than half of older women in the U.S. don't have enough income to afford essential expenses, according to The Hill.

UMass Boston's Elder Index reveals that more than half of older women who live alone are classified as poor under federal poverty standards, while 45% of men are in the same financial shape. The Department of Health and Human Services' average poverty guideline for 2021 is $12,880 per year for a single American.

We can thank COVID-19 for some of this — the pandemic resulted in the highest unemployment rates for people 55 and older in nearly half a century.

House lawmakers recently pushed for Biden to declare climate change a national emergency, but if there's something that deserves that kind of all-hands-on-deck action, it's that half of older Americans who live alone are trying to live on about $12,880 a year.

Amid soaring inflation.

Biden and the Democrats have a lot on their plate, agenda-wise. They've all bellied up to the progressive issue buffet, and student loan forgiveness was a hot item (Biden mulling $10,000 per borrower, the far left-leaners calling for $50,000 per borrower to be erased.)

That's also Biden's self-imposed deadline for deciding whether to forgive student loan debt and how much. Biden told reporters he would decide on broad student loan cancellation "by the end of August."

The premise is simple: The amounts owed are enormous, the debt load stifling, and having to pay it back means putting other purchases like a home on the back burner for years.

It's all about letting people off the hook for their decisions so they can have an easier future. The cost to taxpayers, should Biden go the $10,000 per borrower route, is $373 billion, according to the Brookings Institution.

Helping seniors in poverty belongs higher up on the agenda triage. People who've labored for decades with nothing but Social Security to rely on aren't looking for an easy way to escape responsibilities. Many lost jobs during the pandemic and haven't been able to recover or have had nest eggs depleted by medical bills. A lifetime of retail or service industry wages doesn't set a worker up for a lush Social Security check.

Aging shouldn't be a ticket to poverty.