Living Life
by digby
Years ago I used to think that raising the retirement age wouldn’t be that big a deal. Everyone’s living longer, right?
Wrong:
And those in the bottom 50% are the most likely to really, really need to retire at 67, which is already pretty old by the standards of the rest of the industrialized world.
Kevin Drum answers the inevitable question:
So why does this zombie idea continually resurface with such clocklike predictability? Two reasons, I’d guess. First, it’s a perfect sound bite. “Raise the retirement age” is a whole lot easier to understand than “Change the AIME bend points, reduce the top two PIA factors, and raise the taxable maximum to cover 90% of earnings.” So that’s what we get.
Second, all the loudest voices come from highly educated, white-collar folks who write and talk for a living. They belong to, and speak for, a class that has interesting jobs that don’t tax their bodies, probably aren’t planning to retire at 65 anyway, and in any case, get paid well enough that they can retire early on their investments if they want to, regardless of Uncle Sam’s official retirement age. So it just slips their mind that a higher retirement age would be a way bigger deal to other people than it is to them. Basically, they need to get out more.
I think there’s another motive. There are a whole lot of elites out there who just want to nibble away at it in painful ways because they think it’s making the serfs lazy. At the very least a whole lot of them simply can’t imagine that anyone would actually need that pittance of money to live.
Whatever the motives, it’s a very bad idea. I may be lucky enough to have a longer life expectancy because I am a desk worker but half of my fellow Americans aren’t. 67 is old enough.
Oh, and let’s think twice about continually using SS payroll tax cuts for temporary, lousy stimulus too. It’s going to wind up making the shortfall happen even sooner which will give the “reformers” yet another excuse to cut benefits. If tax cuts are the only possible thing this government can bring itself to do, find another source.
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