Lerner: Remember why we have pensions

Susan Lerner is the executive director of Common Cause/NY, a co-sponsor of the panel discussion, "Public Pensions: The Real Story," at The New School in Manhattan the morning of June 8.

Public pensions have become a focal point in the struggle to close budget deficits in our state and local governments. The subject is complicated and, sometimes the debate gets heated -- and technical. This does nothing to help our civic discourse and allow concerned citizens to understand what's at stake in this debate.

I don't have a solution to this controversy, but I did learn from my mother the personal dimension behind the policy arguments.

Like most of their generation, my parents were not destitute when they retired. My father's pension supported my mother, along with the payout from his life insurance and the sale of their house after he died. I had read about elderly people who had to eat dog food to survive, but I didn't know anyone like that.

All the elderly I knew lived secure, modest, middle-class lives not significantly different from the lives they had lived while working.

I didn't really understand what an important change Social Security and pensions had brought about until my mother mentioned her Uncle Moe. The sharp, acerbic intellect of my mother softened as she progressed through her late 80s, a trait I now know was the beginnings of dementia. Every time I visited her at the assisted living facility where she lived, she endlessly sang the facility's praises.

The county-subsidized facility in New Jersey was reasonably pleasant, I thought, but institutional.

So when my mother would tell me how delightful it was to live someplace so well-lit and clean and how nice the people in the institutional-feeling dining room were, I thought sadly of how much Mom had diminished. Repeatedly, she would point out how lucky she was that her simple studio apartment overlooked a small wooded area.

Then, one day, she said, "You know, I always expected to end up like Uncle Moe."

Growing up during the Depression, she told me, it was her task to visit and bring a little food to her uncle. Moe Ginsburg had worked as a furrier, but as he grew older he couldn't meet the physical demands of the job. She remembered climbing the six flights of stairs to his little dark room in a building crawling with rats and bugs, with an overflowing, foul-smelling shared toilet down the hall.

Moe was always grateful for the scraps of food she brought. He was always hungry, she said, because he had no money. By then, he was a feeble old man, but a few years before, when he could work, he'd been cheerful, kind, and strong -- everyone's favorite uncle. She was as frightened and horrified telling me that story at 87 as she'd been as a child of 7.

I felt her fear. For the first time, I understood her gratitude. I saw how far we had come in the space of her lifetime. The alternatives to a safe retirement were suddenly very, very real.

"My greatest fear was that I would end up like Uncle Moe," my mother quietly said. "Instead, I'm lucky to be in this lovely place."

But Uncle Moe's story made it clear to me that luck has very little to do with it. The difference between my mother's old age and Uncle Moe's old age were social and public policies that value our elders and allow us to afford to care for them.

In the airwave wars that represent the most public part of this debate over budgets and the ideologically extreme recriminations traded over public pensions, the reason why we, as a civilized society, have pensions is too frequently forgotten.

In addition to grappling with the numbers, we need to have an honest and detailed discussion about the purpose behind our pension systems for public and private workers and how we ensure that that goal is met in a fiscally responsible way. Right now, debates about pensions are a model of how not to address a complex public policy issue with significant human and economic consequences.

We need to remember Uncle Moe.