Yes. Social Security Retirement Age Should Be Raised
- AMAC & The Heritage Foundation
Rachel Greszler, a Senior Research Fellow at The Roe Institute, makes the case for raising Social Security’s full retirement age to 69 or 70 as a way to stave off insolvency. When the program was enacted, life expectancy at birth was 61 with a retirement eligibility age of 65. Many people never received Social Security. Today, life expectancy at birth is 79, and Social Security has an early retirement eligibility age of 62 and a normal eligibility age of 67.
Increased life expectancies, higher quality healthcare, and shifts away from physically demanding work have all increased older Americans’ work capacity. A 2016 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that given these factors, Americans could work an additional 2.5 years to 4.2 years, which would be equivalent to a 30 to 50 percent increase in employment among 65-year olds. Read the full op-ed 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.
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