We have your box ready for you, Mr. Shields

I guess faux-president Trump is on vacation right now. This is the vacation he said he’d never take because he’d be working so hard in the White House. You know, the White House he said he’d never leave and now can’t wait to get out of every Friday afternoon. The White House he thinks is a dump.

He says it’s a working vacation. If he’s working in New Jersey the same way he works in Washington, I’d expect him to put in a good solid one or two hours a day at best. Thank you for your service, Mr. Trump. When do you tee off?

I have mixed feelings about Trump going on vacation. The angel on my shoulder thinks we might get 17 days of relative peace and quiet while he’s in New Jersey “working” -- that's working on his short game, his hook and his slice. I mean, I don’t see where he’s tweeted anything yet today. The devil on my other shoulder is angry because he gets to go on vacation and I can’t.

My last vacation was in 2004 when my wife, her father and I went to the Outer Banks. That was 13 years ago. Three of my four grandchildren weren’t even born then and one of them will be starting junior high this month. Our last dog, Chelsea, was still alive and healthy and our cars were not yet antiques. I was working in a nuke plant where I made good money and had plenty of accrued vacation time. I retired after that vacation, and we haven’t gone anywhere since.

I know you’re wondering why, right? Well, I’m really glad you asked.

For one, we don’t travel all that well these days because of our pre-existing medical conditions. You know, the ones that were discussed at length during the Congressional debate on repealing the Affordable Care Act. I won’t elaborate, but trust me when I tell you that pre-existing conditions are very real and no joke, and if not for the ACA, would make health insurance completely unaffordable for my wife and me.

And that’s the second reason why we don’t take vacations.

Thanks to the vacationing Trump and the vacationing members of Congress, uncertainty continues to linger over the future of our health insurance in particular and our financial condition in general. It appears that some members of the Senate want to come back after recess and barf up another bad bill to repeal or replace the ACA, while for his part, Trump keeps threatening to cut off the government subsidies that make the ACA even marginally affordable.

This financial uncertainty makes it imprudent for retired people of modest means to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a vacation, even if we were up to it physically, when the money might be needed next year to cover medical expenses. 

Even if nothing happens to “Obamacare” between now and the end of 2018, when my wife becomes eligible for Medicare, there’s another sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. As far as we know, House Speaker Paul Ryan still wants to mess with Medicare by extending the eligibility age or cutting back on benefits or going to full-on privatization. That causes even more uncertainty for people like us.

And how would we pay for changes in our health insurance? Why, we’d use our Social Security benefits, of course. But wait! Paul Ryan wants to take those away, too, which would leave us with about one-third of our current income. That’s assuming FirstEnergy doesn’t put an end to our pension payments the way they did with our life and health insurance.

Two years ago my wife and I were moving along through life – somewhat slowly but moving along all the same. We were moderately content if not full-blown happy and contemplating the possibility that we would never see another Republican president in our lifetimes. We’d live out our days with Medicare and Social Security to protect us the way they were intended, seeing as how it was our money to begin with, and use our small retirement fund if we needed it.

As the narrator said in "Cannery Row," the world was spinning in greased grooves.

And then out of nowhere we got Trumped.     

I won't go through all of that again except to say this: I no longer believe as I once did that good people who live clean lives, care about others, work hard, stay out of trouble and raise good families will be securely wrapped in the benefits they were promised when they reach their golden years. That no longer holds true. But if you’re rich enough, greedy enough, sleazy enough, self-centered enough and arrogant enough to take what you can from whomever you can and add it to your own portfolio, you’ll do quite well in Trump’s America, and thank you very much.

So are we going on vacation this year? Are you kidding me? I’m just hoping that in a year or so, if we’re lucky, we won’t be living in a refrigerator box under one of the bridges across the Monongahela River. On the bright side, while that might not be the beach we’d choose, at least we’d be living near water.