About Increasing Social Security’s Full Retirement Age - MarketWatch
With Trust Fund depletion looming on Social Security’s financial horizon, there is no shortage of ideas for resolving the program’s financial woes to avoid a potential across-the-board cut in everyone’s benefit in less than a decade. Included in most discussions is the fact that life expectancy has increased substantially, with average longevity now mid-80s for those first becoming eligible for Social Security. And that leads naturally to suggesting an increase to Social Security’s full retirement age (FRA) as one possible way to resolve Social Security’s financial issues.
This MarketWatch article by Alicia Munnell tees up the idea of increasing the full retirement age as a logical Social Security reform item, but suggests doing so in a way which maintains the inherently progressive nature of the Social Security program – raise the retirement age only for those in the higher income brackets. Click here to read Alicia Munnell’s idea published at MarketWatch.
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 with minimal 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.