Elon Musk is trying to give tens of millions of older Americans heart attacks

I often think about this passage below from James Merrill. The poet wrote about lying in bed towards the end of his life inside what had been his grandmother's New York City apartment during the height of America's AIDS pandemic:

Sirens at present like intergalactic gay
Bars in full swing whoop past us night and day.

Sometimes, shocked wide awake, I’ve tried to reckon
How many lives—fifty, a hundred thousand?—
Are being shortened by that din of crosstown
Ruby flares, wherever blinds don’t quite…
And shortened by how much? Ten minutes each?
Reaching the emergency room alive, the victim
Would still have to live years, just to repair
The sonic fallout of a single scare.

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to find that even good-faith emergency responses have costs that rarely outweigh the benefits.

"The time saved by lights and sirens is slim — somewhere between 42 seconds and 3.8 minutes," a recent study found.

Meanwhile, roaring sirens and weaving ambulances present a clear and present danger to patients, ambulance drivers, other drivers, and a general public with flooded with stress chemicals, adrenaline and cortisol:

Some arteries constrict, others dilate, blood pressure rises, digestion slows and sugars and fats flood the bloodstream for quick use by the muscles. (The response may be enhanced if the noise is annoying or outside of a person’s control.) The cascading stress response also prompts the creation of harmful molecules that cause oxidative stress and inflammation in the lining of blood vessels. This dysfunctional endothelium meddles with blood flow and affects numerous other processes that, when impaired, contribute to a range of cardiovascular illnesses, including high blood pressure, plaque buildup in the arteries, obesity and diabetes.

Stress kills. And there's nothing scarier to older Americans than the thought of running out of money—not even death.

So, imagine how you—a Social Security beneficiary—would feel if you saw this:

What is the richest man alive doing with his spare time?

Elon Musk is terrorizing retired Americans—or Americans who should be retired but still need to work to survive—by threatening their literal lifeline.

His assault on Social Security has become the focus of most of his villainy. He—a man who has made a billion dollars at least on cryptocurrency and holds a vast chunk of his fortune in what may be the most inflated stock ever to exist—has called the crown jewel of America's safety net "a Ponzi scheme."

Musk, Trump, and House Republicans have decided to follow the Georgia Medicaid expansion model to destroy America's earned benefit programs. That massive failure the right touts as their blueprint has left about 97% of those eligible without coverage. This is due to ridiculous administrative burdens generated by consultants who have sucked in tens of millions of dollars.

They're lying by insisting they're not cutting the program. No! They're just eliminating people's ability to enroll or stay enrolled. The number of people this would have to affect to generate the nearly $1,000,000,000,000 in cuts to the program would be massive and include many of the most medically fragile Americans.

And while Elon Musk is super sensitive about Tim Walz talking about Tesla's stock price, he does not give a shit about the adrenaline and cortisol he is drowning America's seniors in. He's so cavalier about their precious checks that he risked the entire Social Security Administration's shutdown. He—someone no one elected—plans to close 47 Social Security offices and 6 of 10 regional field offices. That's paired with a 12% in staffing that would eliminate 7,000 employees, exploding the wait times for all the intricate, life-saving work the Administration does—all to save a fraction of the $500,000,000,000 or so billion Musk's efforts have cost us in revenues.

It's no wonder that some of the most skilled workers in the Social Security Administration—those charged with fixing glitches in the payment system—are fleeing into the private sector, inflaming fears that some beneficiaries will miss checks for months.

“Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits," said former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley. "I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.”

O'Malley said that before Musk's latest attack on seniors—a demolition and remodel of the aged but reliable Social Security Administration computer systems that could threaten the entire program.

And why are we doing this again?

Trump and Musk invent nothing.

Republican attacks on Social Security are as old as the program itself. Musk/Trump's desire to privatize Social Security mirrors what George W. Bush tried to do at the beginning of his second term after he—like Trump—tried to use his "political capital" to gut America's favorite program. W. failed miserably because Republicans in Congress feared voters' fury.

Musk doesn't have that fear. Instead, he is high on the power Citizens United gave him, which he feels—with some justification after the last election—gives him the ability to scam voters into voting in any way he prods them.

He—weaponizing decades of dog whistles about the government doing too much for "them"—has declared an emergency that demands massive pain for the poorest Americans and huge tax cuts and billions in government contracts for him.

Everyone should know that Social Security will be fully funded at least for the next decade.

"It has amassed combined trust funds of about $2.8 trillion, and the excess income is invested in interest-bearing Treasury securities," explains the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

There are unnecessary triggers in the law that would punish beneficiaries that should be removed. But the biggest threat to the program has always been Republicans, like Elon Musk, who want to destroy it.

And what are the cornerstones of any long-term fixes to the program? Taxing people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump and increasing immigration.

Musk and Trump are doing the exact opposite because they don't care what they do to seniors' hearts.

Seniors are noticing

Just as Wall Street is slowly realizing that Tesla is a pumped-up meme stock destined for a crash, the American people are beginning to sense the doom Americans sense dawning from Musk and Trump's attack on our wellbeing.

And seniors are getting it before everyone else.

"Consumers' near-term outlook for incomes, business, and labor market conditions fell to the lowest in 12 years, and far below the threshold that usually signals a looming recession," report Axios. "The deterioration was sharpest among older Americans."

Social Security—like American democracy itself—has never faced a crisis like Elon Musk.

He threatens our freedom, dignity, and the benefits we've worked our whole lives to earn. The damage he's doing will be calculated for the rest of this century, but it can already be felt in the hearts of the 73 million Americans who depend on Social Security.

If we want to keep that heartache turning into as few heart attacks as possible, we must push back now against him while we still can.