People are living — and working — longer than ever, and the trust fund is running out faster than politicians want to admit. Is 70 a fair ask, or a broken promise to everyone who paid in for decades?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentI don't usually comment on these things but I want to say something personal. My husband died at 69, two months before he would have been eligible for benefits under a raised retirement age. He paid in for 44 years. His whole working life. And the response from some people is 'that's just how the math works.' I don't know what to say to that except it doesn't feel like math to me. It feels like a theft.
I'm 58 years old, been a nurse for 32 years. My feet are destroyed. My shoulders have needed two surgeries. I am not physically capable of doing this job until I'm 70, and there aren't a lot of desk jobs waiting for burned-out nurses. What exactly is the plan for people like me?
everyone saying raise it is probably a desk jockey who's never done a hard day's physical labor in their life. easy to say wait til 70 when you sit in an air conditioned office
anyone notice how the people voting on this stuff have their own completely separate pension system? Congress members get a sweet federal pension plus Social Security. must be nice to reform a program you barely depend on
The magic fourth option the person above is dismissing is called 'removing the payroll tax income cap.' Right now income above roughly $168,000 isn't taxed for Social Security at all. A hedge fund manager pays Social Security tax on the same dollar amount as someone making $168k. That's the lever people aren't pulling.
Why is raising the age the only solution anyone talks about? Lift the payroll tax cap. Right now income above $168,600 isn't taxed for Social Security. A hedge fund manager pays the same SS tax as someone making $170k. Fix THAT first.
My dad worked in a steel mill for 38 years. His knees were shot by 60, his back by 55. You want to tell him he has to wait until 70? This isn't a policy debate for people like him. It's a death sentence dressed up in actuarial language.
The thing that kills me is we're having this debate while Congress members who've never worried about retirement security a single day in their lives make the decision. My congressman has a defined benefit pension, federal health insurance for life, and investment income. He's going to tell a 68-year-old Amazon warehouse worker to wait two more years? Come on.
Also — and this is crucial — lower-income Americans have SHORTER life expectancies than wealthy ones. So raising the retirement age disproportionately punishes the people who most need the program. The wealthy person lives to 85, collects for 15 years. The laborer dies at 72 and collects for 2. How is that fair?
Answer to the question above: yes, basically. They either draw down savings, take early Social Security at a permanent benefit reduction, go on disability if they qualify, or some grim combination. Raising the age without robust bridge programs for displaced older workers is how you create a hidden elder poverty crisis.
i paid into this thing since i was 16 working at a grocery store. i am now 61. if they raise the age to 70 i want every single dollar i put in back with interest. this was supposed to be a deal.
Raising the retirement age disproportionately punishes Black Americans, who have statistically lower life expectancies than white Americans. That's not a talking point, that's documented public health data. A policy that sounds neutral on paper can have deeply unequal effects in practice.
Fun fact: raising the retirement age is functionally identical to a benefit cut. If you were going to collect for 15 years and now you collect for 12, you just got a 20% cut. Politicians love calling it 'reform' because cut is a scary word.
My father-in-law retired at 66, got diagnosed with Parkinson's at 68. He has enjoyed maybe one good year of retirement. And you want people to wait until 70? I'm sorry but life does not accommodate our policy timelines.
my mom cleaned hotel rooms for 30 years. thirty years of bending and scrubbing and hauling linens. she retired at 66 and had maybe three good years before her body really started breaking down. she wasnt living longer in any meaningful sense. she was just surviving longer. theres a difference
The savings argument ignores wage stagnation for the bottom 60% over the past four decades. You can't save what you don't have. Telling people who made $38,000 a year their whole career that they should have saved more is telling them they should have conjured money from nothing.
Raise it. Period. We're all pretending like it's still 1935 when FDR set the age at 65 and the average life expectancy was like 61. The math has completely changed. The program has to change too.
The framing of this as an either/or — raise the age OR the program collapses — is a false choice that both parties have been peddling for thirty years and I'm exhausted by it. There are at least six levers you can pull on the revenue side alone before you ask a 68-year-old warehouse worker to keep lifting boxes for two more years. Means-test the benefit at the top. Adjust the COLA formula. Change how investment income is treated for payroll tax purposes. The fact that Washington keeps landing on 'make the workers wait longer' as the default solution tells you everything you need to know about who actually runs this country.
SOCIAL SECURITY HAS NEVER MISSED A PAYMENT IN 88 YEARS. It's not 'running out.' Stop letting politicians manufacture a crisis to justify cuts. The program can pay full benefits until 2033 and STILL pay 80% after that without a single change. The sky is not falling.
Fine, raise it, whatever. But can we also talk about the fact that 62-65 year old workers get absolutely frozen out of the job market? Age discrimination is illegal and rampant and completely unenforced. You want people to work until 70, you better actually make employers hire them.
The life expectancy argument is more complicated than people realize. Average life expectancy going up is largely driven by lower infant and child mortality, not by 65-year-olds suddenly living dramatically longer. The people raising the age are cherry-picking the statistic.
worked offshore oil for 22 years. anyone who thinks 70 is reasonable for that job has never spent a night on a platform in the Gulf in January. im 52 and already looking at knee surgery. my body isn't going to last to 67 let alone 70
Look, I lean conservative and I think the program needs reform, but I can't get on board with raising the age without serious carve-outs for physical laborers and people in poor health. A blanket age hike is lazy policy that protects wealthy retirees who don't need SS anyway while crushing the working class. We can do better than this.
my grandfather worked construction, retired at 65, was dead at 67. the government collected his money for 45 years and he got two years out of it. raising the age just means more people like him subsidize everyone else and get nothing. that's not a safety net, that's a scam
as someone who works in HR at a mid-sized company i can confirm age discrimination is real and pervasive and basically unprovable in most cases. we dont say 'youre too old' we say 'culture fit' or 'energy level' or whatever. raising the retirement age without addressing this is genuinely cruel.
I think we need to separate the conversation about physical laborers vs knowledge workers. A 68-year-old software architect or professor or accountant can probably keep working. A 68-year-old roofer or miner absolutely cannot. One blanket age for everyone is a blunt instrument for a complex problem.
The life expectancy argument is basically 'people are living longer so they should work longer' but that logic conveniently ignores that the extra years are mostly at the END of life, often in declining health. You're not adding healthy working years, you're cutting into recovery time.
I retired at 66 after 35 years as a high school teacher. Mentally I was ready to be done at 60, honestly. The emotional labor of that job — especially the last decade with everything schools have dealt with — is invisible in these conversations. Exhaustion isn't always physical.
What I want to know is why we're asking workers to sacrifice more instead of asking corporations that have benefited from decades of tax cuts to contribute more. The Overton window on this debate is so narrow it's almost claustrophobic.
The framing of this question bothers me. Social Security isn't a gift from the government — it's deferred wages. I paid into it for 40+ years under a specific set of rules. Changing those rules now isn't reform, it's breach of contract.
My position is simple: if you've worked 40+ years in a physically demanding occupation, you should be able to retire at 62 with full benefits. If you've worked a desk job until 70 and want to keep going, great, collect at 70. Why do we insist on a one-size solution for an enormously varied workforce?
genuine question: if we raise the retirement age to 70 but people start claiming disability benefits earlier because they literally can't work, haven't we just shifted the cost to a different program? has anyone actually modeled that?
Honestly the whole thing is a mess that both parties created by raiding the trust fund for decades and then acting shocked when there's no money. This isn't a retirement age problem. It's an accountability problem.
Honestly? I think 70 is fine for people in their 30s and 40s who have time to plan around it. What's genuinely cruel is changing the rules on people who are 55, 58, 60 — they've organized their entire financial lives around existing expectations. Phase it in or don't do it at all.
look I'm 34 and I fully expect social security to not exist by the time I retire so honestly do whatever you want with it lol. I'm just maxing my Roth IRA and hoping for the best
Genuine policy question for anyone who knows: if the age goes to 70, what happens to the people who are laid off at 64 and can't find work? Do they just eat through savings and retirement accounts for 6 years? Because that's a real scenario that happens to a lot of people right now even with the current age.
To the person above — paying 80% of promised benefits IS a problem though. An 80% benefit for someone living on $1,400 a month means they can't eat. 'Only' 20% less sounds small until you're that person.
The political reality is that no one gets elected by cutting Social Security, which is why nothing ever changes, which is why it actually will eventually get cut when there's no other option. Courage in Washington is extinct.
I keep hearing 'people are living longer than ever' cited like it's settled fact but we actually had life expectancy DECLINE during COVID and opioid crisis years. We're not on some inevitable upward trajectory here. These are real people dying younger than their parents did in some communities.
That's exactly what happened when they raised it from 65 to 67. Disability claims went up. We'd be robbing Peter to pay Paul and congratulating ourselves for 'fixing' Social Security.
OK unpopular opinion but if we raised the age to 70 AND means-tested it so wealthy retirees don't collect, we'd probably solve the funding problem without cutting anyone who actually needs it. But no one wants to say that out loud.
Slippery slope warning: if we raise it to 70 now, in 30 years when life expectancy is longer, we'll be having the same debate about raising it to 75. At some point we have to say the purpose of Social Security is to give people REST before they die, not to maximize the years they spend working.
I've seen this argument made that raising the age 'only' affects people by a small percentage. Brother, two years of Social Security benefits is somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000 for an average recipient. That is not a rounding error. That is a car, a roof repair, a medical emergency fund. Real money for real people.
Hot take: this whole debate is a distraction. The real issue is that Americans don't save and we've built a society where you need to work until you drop because healthcare costs are insane and wages haven't kept up. Fix those things and retirement age becomes less life-or-death.
My grandma is 82 and has been collecting since she was 66. If the age had been 70 she might have made it, might not have. Four years matters at that end of life. Four years is not nothing.
To the person who shared about their husband — I'm so sorry. That's the human reality behind all these abstract policy discussions and we lose sight of it constantly.
I'm an economist and the 'lift the cap' argument is correct but incomplete. Even removing the cap entirely only extends solvency by about 75 years in most models. It buys time but isn't a permanent fix either. There are no clean answers here, only tradeoffs.
Can someone explain to me why this is even controversial? The math literally doesn't work. You either raise the age, raise taxes, cut benefits, or some combination. Those are the only levers. Pretending there's some magic fourth option where we do none of those things is how we ended up here.
Contrarian take that nobody wants to hear: Americans are also terrible at saving. Germany, Netherlands, Denmark all have later retirement ages and more generous benefits because they fund them better AND their citizens save more. Our problem is partly structural and partly cultural and we only ever want to talk about the structural part.
Every single time this comes up, the people most loudly against any changes are also against raising the payroll cap, against means testing, against any adjustment whatsoever. You can't demand the program be preserved AND refuse every mechanism to preserve it. That's just vibes, not policy.
I support raising the age gradually, like phasing it in over 20 years so it doesn't hurt people close to retirement. Jumping to 70 overnight would be catastrophic. But pretending the current trajectory is sustainable is just dishonest.
That 1983 comparison cuts both ways though. Those reforms were painful and controversial and they barely bought us 40 years of solvency. We keep patching instead of fixing. Maybe it's time for a real structural overhaul with everything on the table.
I feel like every generation says 'social security won't exist for us' and then it keeps existing. I'm going to keep paying in and stop catastrophizing.
I'm 29. I think everyone older than me forgets that we've been told our whole lives this program might not exist for us. So when I hear 65-year-olds fighting to protect benefits they'll collect and I won't, it's hard to feel super enthusiastic about the status quo either.
Raise it to 70 with one condition: any job classified as physically demanding by the Department of Labor automatically keeps the 65 threshold. Problem solved. You're welcome, Washington.
lmao imagine working your whole life paying into a system and then the government goes 'actually wait two more years' and you just have to take it. this country would riot if they did that to literally any other contract
The comparison to private contracts is interesting but Social Security was always explicitly designed to be adjustable by Congress. The 1983 reforms already raised the full retirement age from 65 to 67. People forget we've been here before and the sky didn't fall.
Bold idea: how about we let people decide when to retire and stop pretending the government knows better than a 67-year-old whether she's ready to stop working. The paternalism in both directions — raise it, don't raise it — is exhausting.
The word 'broken promise' in the question framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's not a promise, it's a program. Programs get adjusted. Medicare has been adjusted dozens of times. The framing of it as sacred and immovable is exactly why we can't have a real conversation about this.
ok but the payroll cap argument while valid doesnt fully solve it either so we probably need multiple reforms happening simultaneously not one silver bullet
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Are dating apps genuinely harder for men or for women?
108 comments
Is judging someone by their height as shallow as judging by their weight?
108 comments