How Raising The Retirement Age Screws the Poor

[Glia]

there are good arguments for *lowering* the retirement age to reduce the workforce pool and raise wages, which in turn will generate more contributions to Social Security funding.
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— By Kevin Drum
| Fri May. 13, 2011 3:00 AM PDT


I've never been a fan of raising the Social Security retirement age. It's a blunt instrument mainly favored by journalists and policymakers who don't plan to retire at age 65 anyway and figure that asking people to work a little bit longer than they used to is no big deal. But people who don't have white collar jobs quite plainly don't feel the same way about it, as the skyrocketing number of people who retire early at age 62 demonstrates. We've already raised the full retirement age to 67 (this was part of the 1983 Social Security deal put in place by the Greenspan Commission), and I think there are plenty of better ways of bringing Social Security into balance than by raising it yet again.
Aaron Carroll demonstrates this dramatically with the chart below, taken from a paper by Hilary Waldren. As you can see, life expectancy in the top half of the income distribution has indeed risen dramatically over the past few decades. But in the bottom half of the income distribution, it's barely risen at all.


Read the entire article:
https://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2...age-screw-poor

[Braggi]

there are good arguments for *lowering* the retirement age to reduce the workforce pool and raise wages, which in turn will generate more contributions to Social Security funding.
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Not sure I understand the math on that one, but here's a couple I get clearly: let's drop the income cap on contributions and means test recipients. Nobody earning $500,000 a year at age 66 should be getting entitlements.

-Jeff

[Glia]

That's an easier one to get and the results are more immediate.

As Thom Hartmann is all too fond of pointing out, if Bill Gates and his ilk were paying SSI tax on their entire annual income instead of just the first $100K, funding social security would be a non-issue.

This tidbit just in from the Real Time with Bill Maher overtime segment: there is no cap on Medicare contributions. Everyone's entire taxable income is subject to Medicare tax/withholding (not sure which term is correct).

Not sure I understand the math on that one, but here's a couple I get clearly: let's drop the income cap on contributions and means test recipients. Nobody earning $500,000 a year at age 66 should be getting entitlements.

-Jeff