Raise the retirement age

[politicallefty]

Absolutely not. I think the age should be lowered back to 65. Social Security will be solvent for many decades if we remove the income tax cap.

[MeanBeanMachine]

There's never going to be a solution to this crisis which is "fair" for everyone.  That's why it's a crisis.

Right. So it must be the fault of people who want to retire before keeling over on the job at age 70. Let's just ignore the fact that almost $3 TRILLION has been stolen from Social Security. How about slashing the military-industrial complex's funding, and take care of our elderly and our veterans. Maybe even increase the tax rate on millionaires by a couple of percentage points, but OH NO I suppose that wouldn't be "fair" to poor Halliburton now would it?

There's no need for partisanship.  We should want something fair for everyone.  The life expectancy in relation to when social security was formed has improved greatly.  Social security might be in part to thank for this in the positive.  Based on life expectancy in the 1930's, its equivalent would be telling people they couldn't retire today until they're roughly 80.  That just won't do.  Also, money paid into social security when today's retirees were in their 20's isn't worth as much as it is today.  I don't want to sound like we shouldn't do anything, but we owe it to our seniors to return their social security money throughout retirement.  It's a great program for seniors and our economy as younger workers enter the workforce.  Al Gore mentioned a lockbox for social security which was a good idea.  Politicians overspending is largely at fault here.  Higher taxes would only hurt those currently in the work force.  It's a complicated issue but long term solvency might be the best answer here.  A strong economy would serve better for social security than raising the retirement age or taxing companies to the point they leave the US.

[DC Al Fine]

There's never going to be a solution to this crisis which is "fair" for everyone.  That's why it's a crisis.

Right. So it must be the fault of people who want to retire before keeling over on the job at age 70. Let's just ignore the fact that almost $3 TRILLION has been stolen from Social Security. How about slashing the military-industrial complex's funding, and take care of our elderly and our veterans. Maybe even increase the tax rate on millionaires by a couple of percentage points, but OH NO I suppose that wouldn't be "fair" to poor Halliburton now would it?

There's never going to be a solution to this crisis which is "fair" for everyone.  That's why it's a crisis.

Rich person says poor people need to bear the brunt of sacrifices to avoid "a crisis". Neoliberalism at its finest.

See this is where the left loses me. I'm sympathetic to leftish solutions on pensions, but this sort of rhetoric trivializes the gravity of the issue.

As the worker:retiree ratio drops from 5:1, to 2:1, to 1:1 in some countries, it gets more and more expensive to provide the same level of support. This issue is bigger than tweaking the marginal tax rate for millionaires, particularly if you want a more generous pension system than Social Security.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I thought we were talking about the US specifically and not "some countries". Whatever issues Italy and Germany might have, the situation in the US is different, and all I've seen suggests that Social Security is financially secure for the next decades at least.

And regardless, declining fertility rates are not a fatality, but also something that depends on policies. If you want to get serious at dealing with that, a big part of the solution is providing women with the resources they need to reconcile motherhood and a professional life (eg public childcare, long maternity leaves, etc.).

[Green Line]

I thought we were talking about the US specifically and not "some countries". Whatever issues Italy and Germany might have, the situation in the US is different, and all I've seen suggests that Social Security is financially secure for the next decades at least.

And regardless, declining fertility rates are not a fatality, but also something that depends on policies. If you want to get serious at dealing with that, a big part of the solution is providing women with the resources they need to reconcile motherhood and a professional life (eg public childcare, long maternity leaves, etc.).

None of those things are going to increase the birth rate.

[DC Al Fine]

I thought we were talking about the US specifically and not "some countries". Whatever issues Italy and Germany might have, the situation in the US is different, and all I've seen suggests that Social Security is financially secure for the next decades at least.

And regardless, declining fertility rates are not a fatality, but also something that depends on policies. If you want to get serious at dealing with that, a big part of the solution is providing women with the resources they need to reconcile motherhood and a professional life (eg public childcare, long maternity leaves, etc.).

None of those things are going to increase the birth rate.

Agreed The US is a joke when it comes to maternity leave and their fertility rate isn't much different from uber generous Scandanavia. These things are largely cultural and therefore require cultural solutions, which is much more difficult than simply cutting a cheque.

[parochial boy]

It's not just about fertility rates either, fertility rates have actually increased across much of western Europe in recent years, largely as immigrants have more children.

There is always going to be the mathematical factor that the current retirement model was built on the idea that people would live until about the age of 70. If they are going to live to 90, that means they are going to be drawing a pension for 20-25 years, rather than 5-10. That is always going to mean a bigger cost, and a higher share of the population, regardless of the number of young people entering the workforce.

Call me an elitist dipsh!t if you want, but even if we set retirement funding aside, a future in which an increasing large share of children come from the least stable, lowest income, least educated households is one that horrifies me. You can already feel this instability and dysfunction coming through at the community level.

The solution to that is, of course, a society with a smaller gap between the wealthiest and the poorest.

[Indy Texas]

I don't favor policies that screw over young people.

How does it hurt young people to not be paying for a 66 year old's pension?

I would rather raise the retirement age and at least get a reasonable pension than retire on a below subsistence pension, or worse, see the state pension abolished.

The real screwing over of young people was getting rid of defined benefit schemes, that pretty much ensures we get to retire into poverty in any case.

Ironically it was young Gen-X'ers in the 1990's that drove the end of defined benefit plans. Workers in the new rapidly growing tech sector didn't want to stay with one firm more than a few years - in fact tech firms looked suspiciously at applicants who had worked 5 or more years with one company (my wife was working in that industry at that time). That meant those employees couldn't vest in a retirement plan, so they'd rather have their benefits in a 401k - originally designed as a supplement to a basic defined benefit pension. Eventually other older companies followed suit to compete for talent and keep pension costs down compared to the newer tech firms. Now the 401k is the supplement to Social Security which is the only defined benefit plan most workers see.

You're describing the upper end of the labor market. People working in factories weren't asking for "flexibility." They had it forced on them when some private equity firm bought their employer, loaded it up with debt so it could file for bankruptcy and get rid of its pension obligations, and then reincorporate as a new entity with no pensions.

[muon2]

I don't favor policies that screw over young people.

How does it hurt young people to not be paying for a 66 year old's pension?

I would rather raise the retirement age and at least get a reasonable pension than retire on a below subsistence pension, or worse, see the state pension abolished.

The real screwing over of young people was getting rid of defined benefit schemes, that pretty much ensures we get to retire into poverty in any case.

Ironically it was young Gen-X'ers in the 1990's that drove the end of defined benefit plans. Workers in the new rapidly growing tech sector didn't want to stay with one firm more than a few years - in fact tech firms looked suspiciously at applicants who had worked 5 or more years with one company (my wife was working in that industry at that time). That meant those employees couldn't vest in a retirement plan, so they'd rather have their benefits in a 401k - originally designed as a supplement to a basic defined benefit pension. Eventually other older companies followed suit to compete for talent and keep pension costs down compared to the newer tech firms. Now the 401k is the supplement to Social Security which is the only defined benefit plan most workers see.

You're describing the upper end of the labor market. People working in factories weren't asking for "flexibility." They had it forced on them when some private equity firm bought their employer, loaded it up with debt so it could file for bankruptcy and get rid of its pension obligations, and then reincorporate as a new entity with no pensions.

At the time it is primarily in the middle of the labor market. Most of the tech labor was just out of college and willing to work pretty cheaply, hoping to catch onto a hot startup at the right time. Of course, few got the timing just right. The key was that they wanted to frequently switch employers, so it was more about the industry than the income bracket. Nonetheless, when companies that had both tech development and manufacturing, they moved their entire workforce and not just the new tech workers. When the bulk of traditional companies followed suit it wasn't because of equity buyouts, it was just boardroom decisions based on market forces.

[DC Al Fine]

Interestingly, as I approach thirty, the only college friends of mine with children are women who married Mormon men, and even they only have one child per couple with plans for no more than one more.

Among my much more downscale high school cohort, I know plenty of people with three or more children, frequently out-of-wedlock or scattered across different relationships. One woman who graduated after I did just had her fifth, and I think she's only 25.

It's not exactly getting ignored, but the effect of college, graduate school, and student loans on fertility isn't emphasized enough, especially as a point of advice for children. Survey data show that most college women would prefer to have two or more children - there's not much of a difference between them and high school graduates in this regard - but for economic or cultural reasons they just aren't having gen. A very large share will have one or two, but a substantial contingent have none, and few have three or more.

The economic reasons are a big part of it, but even my high earning peers are balking at having kids. Since my wife got pregnant, I've noticed this weird mix of hyperconservatism and Peter Pan Syndrome among a lot of 20-somethings.

I work at a company which has a lot of well paid 20-somethings. Housing in our city is reasonable and we have modest student loan payments for the most part. We ought to be prime candidates for having kids, yet a lot of my coworkers either think they can't afford to or that it's 'not time yet'.

At the root of it, for secular, educated millennials, having children is something you do in your thirties. It's going to be very hard to turn that perception around.

[DC Al Fine]

The economic reasons are a big part of it, but even my high earning peers are balking at having kids. Since my wife got pregnant, I've noticed this weird mix of hyperconservatism and Peter Pan Syndrome among a lot of 20-somethings.

I work at a company which has a lot of well paid 20-somethings. Housing in our city is reasonable and we have modest student loan payments for the most part. We ought to be prime candidates for having kids, yet a lot of my coworkers either think they can't afford to or that it's 'not time yet'.

At the root of it, for secular, educated millennials, having children is something you do in your thirties. It's going to be very hard to turn that perception around.

Something that I've mentioned elsewhere, and that may have come up in this thread already, is the sheer expense of raising children in a household headed by two full-time workers in the absence of deep community ties or nearby family. Providing childcare, transportation, and, depending on circumstances, healthcare for a child is no simple feat when you're paying for services that other families obtain for free - if not by a full- or part-time stay-at-home parent, than from neighbors, nearby relatives, church groups, etc.

(Is this account really descriptive of larger young families nationwide? I have no idea, but this was the norm in my community when I was growing up, and it remains the norm for the people I know who are having more children.)

Every couple I know with 4+ kids had at least two of the following traits: stay at home mom, active church community, grandparents close by. Not sure if my experience is typical of large families nationwide, but it does cover the suburban Evangelical set pretty well.

Of course raising children with the assumption that they are on the college track is more expensive, and not just in terms of putting savings aside for future tuition that, for all we know, could be twice as expensive as it is today by the time they enroll. I don't think that most college prep spending is necessary or even all that helpful for a child's development, but people have expectations to respect and appearances to maintain. Better to have one stable or upwardly mobile child than several who are downwardly mobile, maybe? I take issue with the risk profile of that strategy, but it's easy to see why it makes sense to parents living in an era when social stratification is so palpable.

So the expenses per child grow obscenely large, especially for status-conscious parents. I can understand why, even in a place with relatively low living costs, a working couple with combined earnings of less than about $90k per year would be hesitant, especially if they are renters with lingering student debt, no savings, and no relatives or close friends nearby who would provide significant assistance with childcare. And a large share of couples with earnings much in excess of that will tend to be so career-focused that raising children is likely to take a low priority until those careers are well-established enough for them to be comfortable with balancing their lives more in favor of family.

I also have suspicions about how this is tied up with changing attitudes toward marriage, especially among people who are younger, more secular, and more individualistic, and the effect that this must have on any long-term planning.

I agree with the general sentiment of this, but it does gloss a lot of cultural aspects of this. The decision to live away form family (particularly if you are from a reasonably prosperous area) is cultural. Grandparents not taking an active role in looking after grandkids is cultural. And of course, the need to put kids in umpteen activities is cultural.*

* As an aside, if there's one thing I hate, hate, hate about modern parenting, it's the putting kids in half a dozen activities. It's just so excessive.

[Indy Texas]

There's never going to be a solution to this crisis which is "fair" for everyone.  That's why it's a crisis.

Right. So it must be the fault of people who want to retire before keeling over on the job at age 70. Let's just ignore the fact that almost $3 TRILLION has been stolen from Social Security. How about slashing the military-industrial complex's funding, and take care of our elderly and our veterans. Maybe even increase the tax rate on millionaires by a couple of percentage points, but OH NO I suppose that wouldn't be "fair" to poor Halliburton now would it?

There's never going to be a solution to this crisis which is "fair" for everyone.  That's why it's a crisis.

Rich person says poor people need to bear the brunt of sacrifices to avoid "a crisis". Neoliberalism at its finest.

See this is where the left loses me. I'm sympathetic to leftish solutions on pensions, but this sort of rhetoric trivializes the gravity of the issue.

As the worker:retiree ratio drops from 5:1, to 2:1, to 1:1 in some countries, it gets more and more expensive to provide the same level of support. This issue is bigger than tweaking the marginal tax rate for millionaires, particularly if you want a more generous pension system than Social Security.

I hope this means you support increasing immigration.

The low fertility of native white and black people is part of the reason for our inverting population pyramid.

[Indy Texas]

The economic reasons are a big part of it, but even my high earning peers are balking at having kids. Since my wife got pregnant, I've noticed this weird mix of hyperconservatism and Peter Pan Syndrome among a lot of 20-somethings.

I work at a company which has a lot of well paid 20-somethings. Housing in our city is reasonable and we have modest student loan payments for the most part. We ought to be prime candidates for having kids, yet a lot of my coworkers either think they can't afford to or that it's 'not time yet'.

At the root of it, for secular, educated millennials, having children is something you do in your thirties. It's going to be very hard to turn that perception around.

Something that I've mentioned elsewhere, and that may have come up in this thread already, is the sheer expense of raising children in a household headed by two full-time workers in the absence of deep community ties or nearby family. Providing childcare, transportation, and, depending on circumstances, healthcare for a child is no simple feat when you're paying for services that other families obtain for free - if not by a full- or part-time stay-at-home parent, than from neighbors, nearby relatives, church groups, etc.

(Is this account really descriptive of larger young families nationwide? I have no idea, but this was the norm in my community when I was growing up, and it remains the norm for the people I know who are having more children.)

Every couple I know with 4+ kids had at least two of the following traits: stay at home mom, active church community, grandparents close by. Not sure if my experience is typical of large families nationwide, but it does cover the suburban Evangelical set pretty well.

Of course raising children with the assumption that they are on the college track is more expensive, and not just in terms of putting savings aside for future tuition that, for all we know, could be twice as expensive as it is today by the time they enroll. I don't think that most college prep spending is necessary or even all that helpful for a child's development, but people have expectations to respect and appearances to maintain. Better to have one stable or upwardly mobile child than several who are downwardly mobile, maybe? I take issue with the risk profile of that strategy, but it's easy to see why it makes sense to parents living in an era when social stratification is so palpable.

So the expenses per child grow obscenely large, especially for status-conscious parents. I can understand why, even in a place with relatively low living costs, a working couple with combined earnings of less than about $90k per year would be hesitant, especially if they are renters with lingering student debt, no savings, and no relatives or close friends nearby who would provide significant assistance with childcare. And a large share of couples with earnings much in excess of that will tend to be so career-focused that raising children is likely to take a low priority until those careers are well-established enough for them to be comfortable with balancing their lives more in favor of family.

I also have suspicions about how this is tied up with changing attitudes toward marriage, especially among people who are younger, more secular, and more individualistic, and the effect that this must have on any long-term planning.

I agree with the general sentiment of this, but it does gloss a lot of cultural aspects of this. The decision to live away form family (particularly if you are from a reasonably prosperous area) is cultural. Grandparents not taking an active role in looking after grandkids is cultural. And of course, the need to put kids in umpteen activities is cultural.*

* As an aside, if there's one thing I hate, hate, hate about modern parenting, it's the putting kids in half a dozen activities. It's just so excessive.

In our increasingly unequal society, this has become a necessity.

If we are awaiting a future in which the top 5-10% of "elites" in society are able to live a middle class life while everyone below gets scraps and transfer payments, the result is a bidding war to ensure your child is credentialed enough for admission to that club.

That means the right schools. But getting into the right schools means standing out. And the only way a child can do that is to excel in something like sports or music or arts. And that requires playing on a select sports team with thousands of dollars in fees and equipment costs, and paying for private voice coaches or tutors, and everything else.

I don't want to have children precisely because:

(1) The amount of time and money that is now necessary for me to ensure they have the resources and credentials needed to succeed in life is an unreasonable burden that would reduce my quality of life and threaten my financial solvency for things like being able to support myself in retirement.

(2) Assuming I cannot provide them with these things, I believe that their quality of life as merely "average" people in the late 21st century will be so unpleasant that I'd rather these hypothetical beings simply never exist at all.

[Green Line]

Raise it for Baby Boomers....lower it for Millennials

No.  It needs to go up for everyone, millenials moreso than anyone. 

[SingingAnalyst]

I used to advocate raising it, but now I say keep it the same. Mortality has increased significantly since 2000 for white Americans aged 40-65, especially from suicide, alcoholism, and drugs.

[RINO Tom]

It should absolutely be raised ... to suggest otherwise is crazy to me.  It was set at a time when we could, ya know, actually afford to pay for the retirement of people over 65, because there weren't many!

[RINO Tom]

It should absolutely be raised ... to suggest otherwise is crazy to me.  It was set at a time when we could, ya know, actually afford to pay for the retirement of people over 65, because there weren't many!

It was also set at a time when per capita income was about a tenth of what it is today.

But we use that exact same argument for why the minimum wage should be indexed to inflation.  Do all the math, and figure out what makes sense.  If the degree to which income is "too low" is equal to or greater than the degree to which the retirement age is "too low," I really don't care how we try to make it work.  But the age we set in the 1930s doesn't make sense for today, plain and simple.  That's not a partisan opinion.

You do bring up a good point with your second post, but I'm not sure how many 64-year olds are attractive to hire, either ... that's just kind of a problem you'll have with any arbitrary cutoff.

[Sumner 1868]

The payroll tax needs replacement. I personally think a  tax on derivatives trade is the best bet for funding the program in the long run.