"Hopefully, it's somebody who lives in the area, and this is their reward for having gone through this," said Carol Blackford, a retiree whose home in Little Egg Harbor was flooded with knee-high water during last October's storm.
But there is also a smattering of trade unionists and a huge number of run-of-the-mill middle-aged people.One group of volunteers who had driven 12 hours from Pittsburgh consisted of a thirtysomething white female college professor, a thirtysomething black lawyer and a 67-year-old retiree who had voted Republican until Mr Bush took over the party.
The AFL-CIO recently released a fact sheet arguing that changing indexation for Social Security would cost the average retiree $850 a year.It seems to be working.
The bill for pensions and retiree health care are set to take an increasing share of GDP, which means that fewer resources will go towards the young and their children.
By 2030, Japan and Italy will have only two per retiree; by 2050, the ratio will be three to two.
At current rates of inflation, it would take a long time before the deal would bring the retiree out ahead.
"This was a great opportunity to demand a good-faith gesture from Cuba, like releasing political prisoners," says Ninoska Pérez, a popular Cuban-American radio broadcaster.Some of the older exiles, such as Carlos Trueba, a Cuban-born retiree playing dominoes in an outdoor park in Miami's Little Havana, object to the lack of ideological spine among the new arrivals.
Its unfunded liability for what are known as "other post-employment benefits" (OPEBs), which consist mostly of retiree health care, are estimated by industry analysts at almost $70 billion.
Following this approach would have reduced the chance of the retiree running out of money by the age of 95 from around 50% to 13%.Naturally, caveats are needed.
Mr Mulally is pressing the UAW to set up a union-managed trust that would enable Ford to take tens of billions of dollars of retiree health-care liabilities off its balance sheet.
His alternative is a palliative: a rainy-day fund filled when capital gains are high.In the same eat-your-broccoli vein, Mr Brown wants to start reducing California's $355 billion debt pile, a combination of short-term debt incurred in the bad years and unfunded pension and retiree health-care costs.
