I’ve not checked these numbers, but even if true they are misleading. Because the number of years collecting SSI is “leveraged” in that no one collects at younger ages.
Imagine a simplified situation in which the retirement age is 65 and every single person died at 66. Everyone gets exactly one year of SSI. Now the life expectancy increases by 6 years to 72, i.e. every single person dies at 72. Now everyone gets 7 years of SSI. It’s misleading to say that the average life expectancy increased by only six years, with the implication that this is only an increase of less than 10%, since it’s an increase of 600% in the number of years of benefits.
(Also, the problems that the system faces are in the future, and are based on life expectancy continuing to improve beyond what it already has.)
I can’t imagine how society as a whole is less productive by having some people working versus doing nothing.
Possibly by some very small amount.
I’m not sure what any of this means.
The percentage of people who live long enough to enter the system has undoubtedly increased over the years as well. I’m not sure if it’s true that most people have always lived long enough for this, and it does not follow from the average life expectancy being greater than the SSI retirement age (consider 2 people dying at 64 and one at 68).
But I don’t see the special relevance of this number anyway, or any of your other assertions. As above, what matters if the ratio of people paying in to people collecting.
Make suicide painless, available on demand and the Patriotic thing to do if you’re finally tired of suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I’m thinking a new Cabinet member, Secretary of Hemlock.
Kind of a self-run death panel. Pick up an application at the PO for an all-expense paid week in Hawaii and then a quick passage beyond any need for SS. If it were me, I’m thinking an overdose of smack.
I would agree, but that doesn’t paint the whole picture. Most older people have homes that are mortgage-free and don’t have kids to support anymore. They also have government medical insurance (Medicare).
So, most of us would be in a real pickle to live off of that kind of money, but when you take house, children, and medical premiums out of the equation, that frees up an enormous amount of money.
Life expectancy at 60 for white men went from 15 years to 21 years from 1940 to 2004. Rates are similar for white women but only 4 for non-white men and 6 for non-white women.
So you add in the higher retirement age of 66-67 and a non-white male really only gets an average of 2-3 extra years of SS payments, or an extra 33% (going from 9 to 12 years in retirement).
A white man in 1940 may have collected for 10 years (assuming a retirement age of 65), now he would collect for 16 (assuming a retirement age of 66). That is a 60% increase in payouts per enrolee. Plus there are more people who would’ve died before age 65 than in the past, but I don’t know what % of the public that would apply to.
But like I said FICA taxes for SS are 6x higher than they were in the 40s.
People pay 6x more in taxes for 60% more in payments.
The concept that society is more productive with more people working assumes there are enough jobs to go around, which there are not. An older worker who has higher wages, higher health costs, less energy, more disability and knows less about new technology (all stereotypes about the elderly but meh) may cause a worker in his 20s to be unemployed since that job can’t open until the older worker retires. At my current job one of my coworkers only got hired because someone else retired.
If the government was not constantly stealing from the trust fund, SS would be fine. There would be a slight defecit through the “boomer” years which was planned for, and made up later.
The only reason SS is in trouble is that every administration since Johnson (I think, may be sooner) started “borrowing” from it, but never following through on paying it back, which is STEALING.
If I had saved 13% of my income since I started work at 16 I would have a pretty awesome retirement. If SS can’t provide a decent retirement then it’s because of mismanagement. Fix the mismanagement, don’t increase the retirement age.
Also, I work as a mechanic, working til 70 is a joke. People who espouse increasing the retirement age are people with office jobs or young people who don’t know that getting old is hard.