The usual critical rap on “House of Cards” is that the Netflix series is sexist. Sorry: More striking is how it viciously eats its young, men and women alike. And, behind the melodrama, it has a point.
The old-vs.-young tension comes full boil in Season Three, now that series lead Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), a former congressman, has pushed his way to the White House.
Frank embraces a bold, radical plan: Spend $500 billion to put 10 million people to work — and pay for it by gutting old-age entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
“You are entitled to nothing,” President Underwood tells America — twice. “We’ve been crippled by Social Security, Medicare.”
He tells his staff that the $32,781 an “average senior gets in one year” could go “to a job we could be giving to a single mother.”
This is all a bit superficial.
Having Washington “solve” unemployment by hiring folks doesn’t work — as the show illustrates, with Underwood minions struggling to place workers with firms that don’t need staff.
And slashing entitlements with no warning would cause huge economic upheaval. Do we want homeless 80-year-olds?
Of course, actually fixing entitlements would hit crony capitalism even more than seniors — hospitals, drug companies and “device” makers profit hugely from Medicare.
And . . . we do have an entitlement problem.
Thirty years ago, Social Security and Medicare consumed 26.9 percent of the federal budget. Today, they take 38.1 percent — and in another decade, they’ll eat up 41 percent.
Yes, these programs used to pay for themselves — in that taxes on those working were enough to cover outlays on those already retired, and pay for some other federal spending.
But now they’re running a $420 billion-a-year deficit — money we can’t spend on the future.
Folk on both sides of the aisle are discussing how to help middle-class families and struggling workers of all ages. But it’s hard to do anything big.
Already, federal investment on “physical capital” (bridges and other stuff the economy needs if it’s to grow enough to pay all those retirement benefits) has shrunk by 15 percent as a share of the budget over the last 30 years.
Meanwhile, a national policy of propping up house prices helps baby boomers — but not the young couple who needs a cheap house.
“House of Cards” makes this point in a much flashier way: Anyone under 40 on the show will probably die.
Zoe Barnes, the 20-something reporter from Season One, dies when Frank pushes her under a DC Metro train. And she’s his second murder victim, after 30-something Rep. Peter Russo.
Both Zoe and Peter had their ethical problems — but each dies to preserve Frank’s career.
Spoiler alert if you don’t want to know who dies next: Season Three’s shocking victim also isn’t eligible for AARP.
Rachel Posner, another of the show’s strikingly few under-40 characters, is one of the only real heroes in “House of Cards.”
Yes, she was a prostitute. But she’s turned her life around. She’s also nearly the only character (a Warren Buffet-type aside) who works in the private sector. In Season Three, she’s pulling double shifts in a supermarket and a bar — paying the taxes that everyone else in the show is just consuming.
But Rachel must die, because she, too, is a threat to Frank.
So even as Frank is campaigning to stop the old from robbing the young, he himself survives by killing the young.
In this light, the relatively honest physical depiction of older “House of Cards” characters, which would otherwise be refreshing, is creepy.
The older folk are comfortable in their own skin because they’ll just throw the kids under a train or a van when anyone complains.
It’s worth noting that this theme is an American innovation.
In the original, British “House of Cards” book (more spoilers!), the Zoe-like reporter gal forces the Frank character to his gruesome death. In the British miniseries, Frank does kill Zoe — but eventually vengeance from the grave is hers.
But then, the book was written back in 1989. The updated American “House of Cards,” by killing off one of its last young heroes, taps into an acute anxiety that was harder to grasp a generation ago.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.