Public attitudes toward old age in America reflect two contradictory stereotypes. One portrays the elderly as needy, feeble, and dependent. A more recent caricature presents them as affluent, self-absorbed, and overindulged by taxpayers. The realities of old age are more complex, and the prevailing stereotypes serve mainly to distract attention from the real problems. Older citizens were once among the most destitute of Americans. Today the improved economic status of the elderly—resulting from a combination of public and private efforts (Social Security, Medicare, tax laws, personal savings, home ownership, and the like)—is a major success of U.S. social welfare policy.

Average per capita income for those older than 65 is now on a par with income per person in younger families, and the aggregate poverty rate for the elderly is below that of younger Americans. But there are huge disparities in resources and protection among the elderly. In 1984 only 7 percent of married couples sixty-five years of age or older lived in poverty, but 28 percent of white elderly single women were poor. For elderly single black women, the poverty rate was 62 percent. The poverty rate among the Hispanic elderly was 27 percent. Overall, about 12 to 13 percent of the elderly now live in poverty.

Social Security reforms in the past were designed to produce surplus reserves that would help ease the burden of paying for the large number of retiring baby boomers in the next century. However, these growing surpluses have not been treated as a form of national savings and investment to enhance economic growth—and thus to increase the resources needed in the coming retirement bulge. Instead, the Social Security surplus is being used simply to offset deficits elsewhere in the Federal budget. Meanwhile, Medicare, the national health insurance for the elderly, faces a mounting financial crisis. Current projections indicate that Medicare's Hospital Insurance trust fund will not be able to pay for current services shortly after the turn of the century. The day of reckoning could come even sooner if the experts' rather rosy assumptions about economic growth in the 1990s and the