ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism is a policy framework that promotes the transferring of economic factors from the public sector to the private sector;it endorses limiting government spending, government regulation, and public ownership;and fosters stimulating free market capitalism (Brown, 2003;Greenhouse, 2010). Since the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., neoliberalism ushered in the policies of austerity and reduced government spending on social programs in general, and for older people (Pierson, 1995). In gerontology, this set of ideas challenged the heterogeneity of aging, contributing insights on power relations in regard to age and multiple and diverse social locations (Calasanti, 2009;Calasanti and King, 2015). (2017) , "Precarity draws attention to the implications of neoliberal practices that have altered late life through the combined impacts of the increased short-term contracts, decline in trade unionism, and declining forms of social protection that include a reliance on family/kin or market care, and private market pensions." Even prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the relationship between the construction of older people and the political response to their needs was shifting. Since the 1980s, a vortex of complementary demographic (the older population's tremendous growth), economic (anemic growth);fiscal (unprecedented budget deficits), and political (deeply embedded left-right conflict) pressures emerged (Hudson and Gonyea, 2012).