Should Social Security be raised 70 years old?

[r0beph]

Retirement age should be arbitrary to the retiree. 65 being minimum, however the equality in employment should be inclusive of age and if they choose to remain working and can do so in a quality manner they should be allowed to. Not all 65 year olds will retire to SS at 65, many would be happy to remain working. This way you opt the choice to them without forcing anything definitive. As some 65 year olds NEED to retire, the cases for geriatric health are wide and far apart. You may have an active 65 year old who has 20 good years left in him, or you may have the failing shell of a once proud man who is in desperate need of retirement. Due to the nature and impossibility of prediction of the health at these ages, it needs an arbitrary/minimum only.

 

[DrWho]

Retirement age should be arbitrary to the retiree. 65 being minimum, however the equality in employment should be inclusive of age and if they choose to remain working and can do so in a quality manner they should be allowed to. Not all 65 year olds will retire to SS at 65, many would be happy to remain working. This way you opt the choice to them without forcing anything definitive. As some 65 year olds NEED to retire, the cases for geriatric health are wide and far apart. You may have an active 65 year old who has 20 good years left in him, or you may have the failing shell of a once proud man who is in desperate need of retirement. Due to the nature and impossibility of prediction of the health at these ages, it needs an arbitrary/minimum only.

At present you can retire any time you want to. You just can't collect SS before 65 or while earning too much money.

 

[bokile]

Yes

At present you can retire any time you want to. You just can't collect SS before 65 or while earning too much money.

That is bad

 

[drippinhun]

I could go with a 70 year old scheme if it was mandated that all employees are entitled to at least five weeks vacation and twelve days holiday pay each year they work. Also free health care if they get too sick to work.

 

[jpn of Seattle]

It was supposed to be a plan that once you paid into it you were entitled to withdraw from because it was your money. Adding restrictions on how you can get your own money is crazy. The best thing to do would be to lower the age to collect to 16 so that everyone who is working can get their own money back. That or raise the age to 120 so that everyone can see what a stupid program it is and we can finally get rid of it.

Social Security was never intended to be a 401(k)-type of personal investment. From the very beginning the current taxpayers began supporting the existing elderly who had never paid a dime into the system. Plus there are provisions for non-elderly poor or needy, such as children whose parent(s) die.
Social Security is largely a program in which the current generation pays for the current retirees.

Social Security is one of the most successful programs in our nation's history, and one of the most popular. If you don't believe that, just try to change it--many a politican has gotten their a-- handed to them for trying to mess with it. Most recently was George Bush, fresh off of winning reelection. He spent months barnstorming the country, using all his presidential powers to privatize SS. His program, with a Repubican Congress, when exactly nowhere.

 

[jpn of Seattle]

At present you can retire any time you want to. You just can't collect SS before 65 or while earning too much money.

I believe you can collect SS at age 65 no matter how much you earn. But you begin paying taxes on it when your income moves above $35,000 or so.

I think upping the age to 70, gradually, makes some sense. They've already done that to some extent. I'm 52 and won't be able to get my full SS benefit until I'm almost 67. Details here.

Rather than moving the retirement age to 70, I'd rather raise the income level at which current wage earners no longer pay SS tax. ($102,000 in 2008). source

Increase the $102,000 to $150,000 or $200,000 and the SS fund will remain solvent into infinity.

But first we should probably just wait and watch. Wait another five or ten years and see how the forecasts are doing. As it is, the SS trust fund is solvent through 2041, and the date moves around depending on how the economy does. If by 2015 or so it looks like 2041 is not moving farther out into the future, we may need to take measures.

Social Security is not in crisis, it may not even need any tweaking at all.
Now Medicare...that's another story.

 

[PLC1]

I'll probably never be eligible for SS, as I don't have enough quarters in. If I did start paying in, and get enough quarters, I'd only get half the benefit because I have another pension fund (thank goodness!)

My experience with retirement funds is as follows:

When I was a young buck and not thinking about retirement at all, I was forced to pay 8% of my salary into a retirement account. My employer matched that amount, just like the SS program.

The State of California kept that 16%, paid retirees with it, and invested whatever was left over. Meanwhile people in other lines of work paid their 8% into SS, which was used to pay retirees, but the excess was spent in the general fund. To make matters worse, people who had never paid in got payments out in a kind of welfare system.

When I reached the age of 61 1/2, the state said, "Lookee here, we have all this money saved up from the time you were young and thought you'd never get old, just like the young bucks of today. You can retire at 92% of your salary, and we won't be taking out that 8%, so you'll make as much retired as you do working."

Actually, I went to them and researched it out, but the result was still the same.

When a SS payer reaches the same age, the feds have to say, "Hey, wait until you're 65, and maybe we can pay you half or so. I hope you put something away. We're sorry, but we mismanaged your money."

The difference with State Teacher Retirement and Public Employee Retirement is that the surplus is invested, and no one gets paid who didn't pay in.

SS is a ripoff royal. It should have plenty of funds available for retirees to get a decent pension. It would have, but the government has spent the money on other things.

What we need to do is to take the SS fund out of the general fund, and then start paying back those IOUs.

Oh, yes, and quit paying people who never paid in. It's not supposed to be a welfare system.

 

[jpn of Seattle]

I don't get the "maybe we can pay you half or so." Half of your present wages? But how could they guarantee that when people's wages are so different? Again, it was never intended to be a kind of personal saving account.

When we had those budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton years we could have said, "let's use the surplus to increase Social Security benefits." But instead we said, "let's give great big tax cuts to the rich."

I disagree with you about not paying people who never paid in. One of the reasons that it's so effective in reducing poverty in America is because it helps people, like non-working spouses and severely impaired individuals who never worked.

 

[PLC1]

I don't get the "maybe we can pay you half or so." Half of your present wages? But how could they guarantee that when people's wages are so different? Again, it was never intended to be a kind of personal saving account.

When we had those budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton years we could have said, "let's use the surplus to increase Social Security benefits." But instead we said, "let's give great big tax cuts to the rich."

I disagree with you about not paying people who never paid in. One of the reasons that it's so effective in reducing poverty in America is because it helps people, like non-working spouses and severely impaired individuals who never worked.

I'm not sure just how SS benefits are calculated. From what I've seen SS retirees seem to get about half of what they earned while working. I know it's a lot less than STRS retirees get, and it's because the State of California doesn't spend the retirement fund on other things.

Maybe you can justify welfare payments to the disabled, but why does it have to come from SS? That was supposed to have been a retirement fund for seniors.

My mother, who never paid into SS, got the munificent sum of $450 a month from SS. If my Dad had gotten 90% of his working salary from SS, the way I do from STRS, they wouldn't have needed that money. As it was, they were living on about $2,000 a month. Without having other sources of income, that would have been rather difficult.

 

[Dr House]

Other: SS should be phased out already.

-Dr House

 

[PLC1]

Other: SS should be phased out already.

-Dr House

SS should be taken out of the general fund, and the IOUs paid back. If the federal govenment did that, it wouldn't be necessary to phase out SS, nor to raise the age, nor to increase the tax.

If a private company were to start a retirement fund for their employees, then accept donations to that fund, and spend the money on day to day business expenses, it would be prosecuted for fraud. The feds have been getting away with fraud for years. It's high time that they paid their bills.

 

[Dr House]

SS should be taken out of the general fund, and the IOUs paid back. If the federal govenment did that, it wouldn't be necessary to phase out SS, nor to raise the age, nor to increase the tax.

There are benefits to having private retirement funds that go far beyond just fixing the holes in SS funding. If people build their own nest egg, every average Joe becomes an investor. Savings rates go way up. And high savings rates means three things: First, it means high investment rates and high growth, which means more jobs. Second, banks run very high reserves, which allows lower interest rates and thus easier borrowing and, again, more investment. What's more, banks running high reserves allow the central bank to tighten credit conditions to match, which results in very low inflation, which is good for everybody. And finally, high savings rates mean lower aggregate demand, which causes consumer prices to drop.

If a private company were to start a retirement fund for their employees, then accept donations to that fund, and spend the money on day to day business expenses, it would be prosecuted for fraud. The feds have been getting away with fraud for years. It's high time that they paid their bills.

Absolutely agree.

-Dr House

 

[American First]

Doc, You told us where you were from, not how long you have been here. A lot of us have worked our entire life, and some still working due to economy, and we have all paid into SS. bigtime. Don't tell us we are not entitled to it unless you have paid your dues. I agree also that if the government had kept their hands off of it and left it for those who deserve it we would be fine. The government uses any money it can get it's hands on for anything they choose. We can save a lot of money. Cut the pay and benefits of the Congress, the President and anyone else grabbing it with their greedy little hands.

 

[Dr House]

That's why I said phase out, not cut outright. I'd say the most painless way to do it is allot people born after x date (say, 1980 or something, young people with time to set aside money of their own) less money, then people born after y date even less, and so on and so forth until retirement planning is in private hands. That way people have time to build their own nest egg.

Social security is unsustainable, even if we pay back the IOU's. It was meant as a safety net and very few people were supposed to be able to draw upon it. it was designed for a 15-1 worker-retiree ratio, now we got a 3.5-1 worker-retiree ratio, and it's about to get narrower.

-Dr House

 

[Rhodri]

There are benefits to having private retirement funds....

Most are silent on this idea since witnessing how irresponsible the financial institutions have been as of late.