Zachary Halaschak is an economics reporter at the Washington Examiner. Before moving to Washington, he worked in Alaska, covering politics, government, and crime for the Ketchikan Daily News. While there, Zach won the Alaska Press Club’s second-place award for best reporting on crime or courts for his coverage of a local surgeon’s alleged murder.
Amid a rising national debt and fears about the fiscal stability of Social Security, the idea of raising the retirement age to balance the program's books is garnering more attention. But doing so would be a heavy lift politically.
“It’s one of the most important things we can do not just from a fiscal perspective but from a retirement security perspective,” Blahous said. But even raising the retirement age to, say, 69, wouldn't fix Social Security's funding problems, said Andrew G. Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies Social Security reform, state and local government pensions, and public sector pay and benefits. That age hike would fix a bit under one-fifth of Social Security’s long-term funding gap.
“However, if Social Security says the retirement age is 65, 66, or 67, a lot of people are going to take that as guidance on when they should retire,” he said. “So if you were to keep raising the retirement age and raise it up from 67 to 69, you’re going to get some people who say, 'Look, that’s the right time to retire, that’s when I’m going to do it.'”
Nor do the politics of changes to Social Security bode well for immediate action. Forty years ago, it took a bipartisan agreement between President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill to enact changes at a time when the program also faced funding shortages. The 1983 law, among other things, made one-half of the value of an individual's Social Security benefit potentially taxable income, opening up a new revenue source to fund the program.
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