Factoid of the Day
by digby
I’ve referenced this before, but here’s the Social Security Administration study. Look at Table 4: since 1977, the life expectancy of male workers retiring at age 65 has risen 6 years in the top half of the income distribution, but only 1.3 years in the bottom half.
And this:
Unlike a century ago, people expect their children to live past the age of retirement. This fact has important implications for how workers save for retirement, but has no specific implications for the retirement portion of Social Security. In addition, the increase in life expectancy is not nearly as important as it might first appear. A significant part of the increase in life is between birth and age 20. Including declines in child and teen mortality exaggerate the increase in retirement length. Furthermore, much of the gains in life expectancy come during working years—between age 20 and retirement. This means that workers are not only experiencing longer retirements, but longer working lives as well. Finally, each succeeding generation has been vastly more productive than prior generations—a trend that will continue. Thus, not only have workers on average more years of work over their lifetime, they are better able to save for their retirements.
That last may not come to fruition if the economic structures of today remain, unfortunately. But if that’s the case, they’ll need social security even more …
All of this was, by the way, anticipated in the design of the program, which is why it has been remarkably stable. If it weren’t for the decades long hostility of rapacious greedheads like Pete Peterson (and the apparent conservative desire to consign millions of elderly people into poverty if they are unlucky enough not to hit life’s lottery) the system could be simply adjusted from time to time as needed (as it was in 1983 to cover the baby boom.) Unfortunately, the program is under constant assault so protectors of the system have to form a full fledged defense of the system every time some minor tweak needs to be done — or whenever they Republicans borrow and spend like drunken sailors and leave the Democrats to clean up their mess.
The sad news is that it’s left to old people like me to defend it because younger people are convinced by all the hoopla that they won’t see any benefits anyway. And we’re tired.
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