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Ross Eisenbrey
Raising the retirement age as a way of "saving
No, we don't have to cut benefits as a way to save them. And that's all that raising the retirement age does: It cuts benefits for all retirees, no matter the age they choose to retire. The last increase, from age 65 to age 67, cut benefits for an average retiree by 13 percent, a loss of more than $28,000 over the course of a typical retirement. And that increase hasn't even fully taken effect yet!
It's not immediately obvious, but raising the retirement age to 68 would cut benefits even for someone who waited until 69 to retire, because today, you get a bonus for waiting until 68 or 69. But when the retirement age increases, the bonus disappears for the 68-year-old and is cut in half for the 69-year-old.
And the fact of the matter is that benefits are already less than modest. In fact, the average retiree's benefit is only $14,000 -- less than the minimum wage. Millions of retirees now and in the future will have no income beyond
Why are we even debating
What
What's indisputable is that
Americans already work longer than they did 40 years ago. And while it's true that we're living longer, the gains in life expectancy have been uneven. Higher-income men are living 5½ years longer than in 1982, but lower-income men are living only 1½ years more. And lower-income women have seen their life expectancy decline.
So the right answer to the program's financing problem isn't to make people in physically demanding jobs work until they drop. It's to make the rich pay a fair share of the taxes needed to fund full benefits. If the rich paid taxes on the same share of national income as they did in 1983, 40 percent of the funding shortfall would disappear. (If it was good enough for Ronald Reagan, how can they complain?) But they should pay more. Most Americans want to see the cap on taxable income lifted entirely. If both employers and employees paid the 6.2 percent
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Cutting Benefits Isn't the Way to Save Social Security