Don’t Be Evil?
by digby
Is Eric Schmidt CEO of Google being evil? You be the judge:
PARKER: One last question, what government spending would you cut?
SCHMIDT: I have always felt that since one half of the world’s defense spending is in America, we could do just fine with a little bit less there. The real — that’s a comment.
Yay! Not evil.
Oh wait … here it comes:
The real issues around costs are all in the entitlements and the fact of the matter is we have had an economic change that people are now living much longer and that the entitlements are unaffordable. So, the only solution to think of is delay the onset, increase the number of years people have to work, delay the onset of the entitlement programs and address health care costs.
The president’s proposal does, in fact, that was passed, does have a health care cost containment part. Could have gone further. Of course, increases retirement age and so forth are needed no matter what. And by the way, every country in the western world is facing this and by the way China will, as well.
Uhm. No. Health care costs are a problem. Social Security is fine.
But we are not living in a world where facts are important. We are living in a world where billionaires love to lecture average folks about how they have to sacrifice for the good of the country while they piss and moan about having to pay another percentage point in taxes on their millions and threaten to blow the world up if anyone even asks them too.
Evil.
You can’t expect important billionaires to care about such triviality, but here are the facts about the retirement age (which, compared to the rest of the industrialized world is already much higher for full benefits.)
One way to cut benefits in Social Security is to the raise the retirement age. Adjustments to Social Security’s “Retirement Age” sound to non-experts like a work incentive or an appropriate adjustment for much longer, healthier lives, when it is simply an across-the board benefit cut, albeit disguised, which falls heaviest on those who are in physically demanding jobs or who find themselves laid off and unable to find new employment. Also, because of age discrimination in the workplace, older workers are often forced out of the workforce and can’t find work even if they do not want to retire.
1) Raising the retirement age will place a greater burden on older workers in physically demanding occupations, like nurses, auto workers and teachers, who may not be able to continue to work in their jobs into their mid-to-late 60s.
2) Males in the top half of the earnings distribution who retired at 65 in 2006 could expect to live 21.5 more years, an increase of 5.0 years compared to their counterparts in 1982. Meanwhile, a male in the bottom half of the earnings distribution who retired in 2006 would have a life expectancy of 16.1 years, just 1.1 year more than his counterpart in 1982. For women, overall life expectancy has stagnated, with lower-income women seeing declines in life expectancy, and upper-income and more educated women seeing modest improvements.
3) Numerous studies have documented that increases in life expectancy in retirement have been skewed in favor of those with higher incomes and more education.
4) Indexing the normal retirement age to life expectancy in retirement is inappropriate because it not only means work years would continue to increase while retirement years were fixed, but it also assumes workers are healthy enough to continue working well into old age, punishing those who are not.
5) With a fertility rate close to the replacement rate, any positive net immigration will contribute to labor force growth, which can in turn offset increases in life expectancy and stabilize the beneficiary-to-worker ratio. Thus, though the beneficiary-to-worker ratio is expected to rise with the Baby Boomer retirement, it will level off after 2035 despite projected increases in life expectancy at retirement.
6) Workers currently qualify for full Social Security retirement benefits at the age of 66. If they retire early, their benefits are reduced by a fraction of a percent for each month before the full retirement age — which currently means a 25% reduction in benefits for a worker who retires at 62.
7) There has been a 17% increase in age discrimination cases since 2007, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), suggesting struggles for older Americans in securing and maintaining good jobs.
8) Often older workers can’t work longer. An analysis of the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data revealed that during April 2010, the job market for Americans 55 and older had never been worse.
9) The decrease in the relative value of benefits is not due to a too-low retirement age or baby boomers retiring, but was caused by other factors, including rising inequality, reduced personal savings and health care costs, and could be addressed by eliminating the cap on taxable income.
10) Additionally, many mid-life individuals are “structurally unemployed” meaning that demand for their now increasingly obsolete skills will not suddenly increase in demand after the recession ends. Many of them are underwater on mortgages and faced with family caregiving responsibilities for aging parents, young children or adult children who cannot find work.
You can also read this post to learn why the people who designed social security in the 1930s weren’t primitive morons living in caves and built greater life expectancy into the system.
.