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About Raising Social Security’s Full Retirement Age - Motley Fool
Hyperbole and apparent political endorsement aside, this Motley Fool article by Maurie Backman identifies and tacitly endorses a controversial solution to Social Security’s financial woes – raising the full retirement age (FRA). FRA is when a claimant can get 100% of the benefit they’ve earned from a lifetime of working, and how much each beneficiary receives depends on when they claim relative to their FRA. The reality is that inexorable increases in life expectancy over the decades resulted in most people now collecting SS benefits for decades instead of the few years the program was originally designed for. Raising the SS full retirement age is simply a logical reaction to continuing increases in the expected longevity of American seniors, as this Motley Fool article by Ms. Backman concludes.
As an example of the leading thoughts on reforming Social Security, the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC, Inc.) believes Social Security must be preserved and modernized. This can be achieved without tax increases by slight modifications to cost of living adjustments and payments to high-income beneficiaries plus gradually increasing the full (but not early) retirement age. AMAC Action, AMAC’s advocacy arm, supports raising the thresholds at which benefits are taxed and then indexing for inflation and calls for eliminating the reduction in people’s benefits for those choosing to work before full retirement age. AMAC is resolute in its mission that Social Security be preserved for current and successive generations and has gotten the attention of lawmakers in D.C., meeting with many congressional offices and staff over the past decade.