When I served in the State Assembly and chaired the Committee on Aging and Long-Term Care, I said one thing on the floor more than anything else: seniors don’t get a do-over.
You can’t go back and save more money twenty years ago. You can’t take back the decision about when to retire, or whether to take the pension or the lump sum. Every one of those choices was made under the rules in place at the time. When you’re working, a bad year is a setback. When you’re retired, it’s permanent. There’s no raise next year and no job to go back to.
That’s why I’m voting Yes on Proposition 42.
California’s aging population is not a projection anymore. The silver tsunami is here. When I worked on the Master Plan for Aging, I had to think about seniors who have nothing and no help, and also about people who worked their entire lives, paid their taxes, and set aside what they could so they’d have something to live on. Both are of my concern. Both are vulnerable in the same specific way: they are living longer, on what they already have.
And I know how this state works. We go through boom-and-bust cycles. When the budget gets into a pickle, someone always goes looking for money, and seniors are an easy place to look.
I think about my great-aunt Annice. She was a day worker. When Social Security came along, they told people like her to sign up, that this was how you’d be taken care of when you got old. She did what they told her. And years later, when the government found itself short, there was talk of taxing her retirement, of messing with her Social Security. She was furious. Not about the dollars. About the fact that they had made her a promise and were looking for a way around it once it got expensive.
That fight is as old as this country. Annice knew it, and I’ve watched it my whole career.
Some people will say seniors should pay their fair share. Seniors have paid their share. They paid taxes on that money when they earned it. They paid into the system for decades, expecting it would be there for them. Now the cost of groceries, utilities, housing, and health care has gone up on a fixed income—and the answer can’t be to ask the people with the fewest options left to give the most.
Proposition 42 says the state cannot tax you simply for owning what you’ve saved, and cannot reach backward into decisions you already made. It doesn’t change a single tax Californians pay today. It doesn’t cut a dollar from the schools, health care, or programs in the budget right now. What it does is keep the state from changing the rules in the middle of the game.
That matters for people retired today, and it matters just as much for everyone still working and saving. They deserve to know the rules they’re planning around will still be the rules when they get there.
I’ve spent my career on this. Support the seniors who have nothing, yes, and don’t punish the ones who managed to save. Neither group gets a do-over.
Vote Yes on Proposition 42.
Cheryl Brown is immediate past chair of the California Commission on Aging. She previously served in the California Assembly.