As the idea of raising the retirement pops back up again, videos of presidential candidate Nikki Haley, saying that the retirement age should be raised to more than 65 started to become popular early this month on platforms like Tiktok and Twitter. Americans strongly opposed this according to a Quinnipiac poll in 2023 stating that almost 80% of respondents voted against this idea. Life expectancy is rising, but don’t shy away from the fact that when you get to that age you still have health problems and other issues that affect working ability.
Work is a stress that follows us throughout most of our lives. While high school students try to figure out how to work with their busy schedules, young adults also deal with the heavy burden of student loans. But what is past all of that? Do you work until the day you die? With the direction America is heading due to the cost of living and people working into their 70s, this doesn’t seem so far away from the truth.
It’s unrealistic for the retirement age to be raised. An article from CNBC states why this is unrealistic with Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist, saying “They are using a 40-year old plan that doesn’t work for this economy,”. She is referring to Social Security amendments signed in 1983 because of debt problems, making retirement age older. Ghilarducci also adds that “raising the retirement age the first time was a ‘big failure,’” and that in 1983 senior poverty rates were declining, unlike today where they are actually increasing.
Raising the retirement age could have a negative effect on the quality of life for older people. The news source, Forbes, says “Older people are also often more vulnerable to physical and mental health issues, which can be exacerbated by working longer hours … as people with higher incomes and better health will be able to stay employed longer than those with lower incomes and poorer health.” This leads to the problem of keeping employed people that are at more risk to problems when there are younger more capable adults looking for work.
It isn’t the best idea to raise the retirement age especially for Social Security. One of the reasons people want to raise it is to keep social security and medicare from going bankrupt. The problem with this, Forbes stated, is that having older people who are more vulnerable to health issues will increase the demand for disability payments, ultimately asking Social Security to pay more.
A reason people may be in favor of raising the age of retirement is that life expectancy in the U.S. is rising, which some people, such as Clint McCalla, a senior wealth manager at Lourd-Murray, says in the Forbes article about retirement “People are generally working longer now as they are living longer,”. Forbes states that “Not only does raising the retirement age give Social Security a stay of execution, but it also resets the minds of younger generations to the reality of their life expectancy.” Raising it will keep Social Security solvent for longer.
The Forbes article also states evidence against the idea of raising the age retirement because of life expectancy, adding “Those against the raising of the retirement age say that any extension is a clear benefit cut and a broken promise on the part of their government,” says Robert Reilly, a member of the finance faculty at the Providence College School of Business and a financial advisor at PRW Wealth Management in Boston. Social Security is an old system that needs to be fixed for our generation’s future, but without new ideas and a sense of growth, the issue of retirement will stay the same.
