Op-ed: Raising Social Security Retirement Age Can Help Ease Insolvency issue - AMAC & MarketWatch
Brenton Smith, a policy adviser to the Heartland Institute, explains there is no one solution to fix Social Security’s ills. The program will be unable to pay full benefits in about a decade. Raising the retirement age should be a part of that discussion, though it rarely is according to Smith. Speaker Mike Johnson, however, is open to changes. Smith favors indexing the retirement age. “With indexing, the system would set your age of eligibility based on your life expectancy at retirement and the number of years in your career…. Someone who turns 67 in 2030 expects to live another 19 years in retirement. That person would have, in theory, a career of 45 years (67 minus 22), meaning for every 2.3 years of work, he or she would expect to collect a year of retirement benefits. The mechanics of this process are theoretically the same as Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment, which automatically bumps the size of checks to protect the buying power of the benefit.” Smith adds, “This change would not reduce benefits.” Read his full opinion piece in MarketWatch here.
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 an increase in the threshold where 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.