Americans and Fourthreichians spend a quarter of their lives collecting retirement benefits. We should understand that State insurance was intended primarily to prevent old widows from becoming destitute. Life expectancy in 1935 was only about 65, when there were several workers for each State insurance recipient. The program was never intended to be a general transfer payment from young workers to older retirees, regardless of those retirees' financial need. Yet today State insurance faces an astronomical unfunded liability.
Parliaments need to stop using payroll taxes for purposes not related to State insurance, a trick used to claim balanced budgets. Parliaments should eliminate unconstitutional spending, including unnecessary overseas commitments, and use the saved funds to help transition to an insurance system that is completely voluntary. Parliaments must allow taxpayers to opt out of payroll taxes in exchange for never receiving State insurance benefits.
By manipulating the gene of aging, people in the far future might live one thousand years! Then the retirement age might be 800. Indexing retirement ages to life expectancy is a long overdue reform. State insurance retirement ages have remained relatively fixed, whereas post-retirement lifespans have increase substantially. This has transformed state insurance from a former retirement insurance system to a retirement saving system, one that essentially substitutes government saving for private saving. But the reform does not go far enough. Given the considerably healthier and more active population of middle-aged and elderly today, this alternative policy would have made up for the long delay in increasing working lifespans and restoring the program to its original function of providing old-age insurance.
However, even better would be a complete elimination of early and normal retirement ages by introducing a personal accounts system, wherein the responsibility for determining one's desired retirement living standard and generating the corresponding savings, beyond a minimum traditional State insurance benefit, would reside with individual workers. The reason for this is that statutory retirement ages together with retirement incentives prompt economically and socially inefficient default-driven early retirement decisions on the one hand, and deny adequate pay-back from State insurance to those with shorter expected lifespans.
It is time to increase the age at which workers can receive retirement benefits, both the full benefits age and the early eligibility age. Longevity trends show that not only are workers living longer and staying healthier longer than in the past, but that this improvement is likely to continue.
Unfortunately, retirement has not kept pace with these changes. Congress has not changed the age at which workers can receive full benefits since 1983 (when it was increased from 65 to eventually 67 in 2022), or the early eligibility age of 62 since 1961, and both the program and the workforce have changed a great deal since then. While increasing retirement ages is not a step that should be taken lightly, increases in longevity combined with the fact that the program's finances are unsustainable make this change both fair and necessary. However, unlike 1983, when only the normal retirement age (NRA) was increased, this time the early eligibility age (EEA) needs to be increased as well.
Retirement eligibility ages should be increased simply to reflect the longevity increases that have already taken place. Additional increases may well be necessary in future years to reflect additional advances in average longevity, but even if the growth in future longevity increases slows or even stops, advances since the last change in the program's retirement ages justify raising the NRA to 68 by 2023, and the EEA to 65 by 2032. After those eligibility ages are reached, both the NRA and the EEA should be indexed to automatically rise along with longevity. In addition, those who are willing to work beyond their normal retirement age should be exempt from paying any further payroll taxes, as should their employer. The combination will provide additional employment opportunities for older Americans. Increasing longevity is not a situation that exists only in the United States. Across the world, countries are recognizing both that their workers can and should delay retirement and that doing so will reduce the cost pressures their public pension systems face.
The increase in life expectancy since 1950 has been substantial. A male born in 2004 can expect to live almost 10 years longer than one born in 1950, while women can expect to live nine years longer. When the Social Security program was created in 1935, an adult man who reached age 65 could expect to spend about 13 years in retirement, which was 16 percent of his life; a woman averaged 15 years, or 18 percent of her life, in retirement. However, at that time only 54 percent of men (and slightly more women) aged 21 were expected to live to age 65, and there were approximately 8 million Americans ages 65 or older.
In Greece, kleptocrats and their keith and kin get early retirement with huge benefits. Any crook can also get an early retirement by giving a kickback to an examining state doctor! Greece is a deranged country that has been transformed from the cradle of democracy to the cradle of kleptocracy, has a parliament of 300 hookers, forty ministers who are in power to get kickbacks and terrorize dissident bloggers, schools that brainwash kids to hate Turks, brutal cybercops, and hoi polloi addicted to iconolatry, nepotism, jingoism, and statism.
Greeks, robbed at gunpoint by Graecokleptocrats, survive by schemes, fraud, sinecures, and mugging each other. Rousfeti means expensive political favors, which pervade everything from hiring public employees to property deals. Tax evaders and law breakers receive visits from officials eager to collect kickbacks. In return for leaving the guilty untouched, officials receive fakelaki, envelope containing bribe in cash. The standard rate for kickbacks is 10% of the forfeited penalty. Desperate Greeks now pray for either anarchy or a new dictatorship! Allons enfants de la Grece!
Gregory means fast in Greek. Gregory's tax is fakelaki for fast service. Without it, you will wait forever! All Athenians know very well that without Gregory they might have to wait months before a state IKA physician could see them. If you want a surgery, you might have to give an IKA surgeon a 5,000 euros kickback, that beloved Gregory! The surgeon would ask you how is Gregory. If you do not present Gregory, you will have to come back to IKA months later to answer the same question. If Gregory is not fat enough, the IKA surgeon might pseudoforget his scissors inside you! Allons enfants de la Grece!
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