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Should Retirement Age Be Raised to 70?

Should SSI Retirement Be Set At 70?

  • Yes

    Votes: 13 31.0%

  • No

    Votes: 23 54.8%

  • Maybe (explain)

    Votes: 6 14.3%
  • Total voters
    42
reefedjib said:
As for healthcare, the recent healthcare bill will drive costs up even more, what with taxes, an increased base of insured and fewer doctors.

Not sure what school spending has to do with the cost of healthcare.

We need to eliminate SS and reduce Medicare.
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Not sure what health care will do to SS, but medicare and medicaid are toast.
 
The government just uses Social Security as their own slush fund. Although it's broken by concept, government corruption doesn't help.

Abolish it. You invest your own money in whatever way you want to, and with a better ROI if you're a shrewd investor. And if you squander the extra money away, so be it. All I ask of you is to be a cheap funeral.
 
Cephus said:
The best idea is to just let people invest their own money for retirement, but since there are lots of people who would just squander it, it's probably not feasible. The next best is to put all of the SS money into interest-bearing accounts and everyone gets back exactly what they put into it, plus interest, not one penny more or less. Of course, as you said, that would require that the government have any self-control whatsoever, which we all know it doesn't.
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This is why I wish we had an ability for federal popular initiatives, so the people could pass a referendum that would prevent the government from using money paid into Social Security for anything except Social Security, and would prevent the government from investing that money as T-bills or anything else.
 
Korimyr the Rat said:
Yes, that is exactly what it is. And that is the only way to save Social Security-- ensure that more people pay into it and fewer collect.
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Why not allow people to opt out of social security and be the masters of their own retirement?
 
I still don't understand why there's an 'age' to retirement . . . people should be able to work/save for retirement and retire whenever they want - the gov should have no say in that.

I guess, then, the only thing they're really telling you is *when* they will give you *the government* benefits for retirement.
 
Aunt Spiker said:
I still don't understand why there's an 'age' to retirement . . . people should be able to work/save for retirement and retire whenever they want - the gov should have no say in that.

I guess, then, the only thing they're really telling you is *when* they will give you *the government* benefits for retirement.
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That's it, pretty much.
 
digsbe said:
Why not allow people to opt out of social security and be the masters of their own retirement?
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Because people can plan to work until a certain age and circumstances will conspire to prevent them from doing so. People cannot control when they become too old or too sick to work. I don't believe in retirement at all, but I have no problem with people who save up their money to be able to do so. But people who have worked all of their life should be supported once they are no longer capable of doing so.
 
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digsbe said:
Why not allow people to opt out of social security and be the masters of their own retirement?
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I am very torn on the issue of social security. I think that you should be able to "opt out" and get rebated at least a certain percentage of what you put into it if you'd like, or make some kind of retroactive system, on the other hand millions of Americans really do need this stuff, especially when you get older and the amounting cost of medical bills pile up.
 
JohnWOlin said:
I am very torn on the issue of social security. I think that you should be able to "opt out" and get rebated at least a certain percentage of what you put into it if you'd like, or make some kind of retroactive system, on the other hand millions of Americans really do need this stuff, especially when you get older and the amounting cost of medical bills pile up.
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I would perfectly happy opting out and leaving what I already contributed in the system, as long as I don't have to pay another dime towards retirement benefits.

I can see the argument for disability, although that needs serious reform as well, but not for SS.
It's unfair, to all income spheres, that actively save for their own retirement.
Not to mention, a major rip off, if you die before retirement age.
 
The retirement age should be lower not raised and the cap should be significantly raised or eliminated altogether. Lowering the retirement will leave more room for younger workers.
 
All Ponzi schemes eventually fall apart and someone is going to take the hit.
Abolish SS now and let the boomer generation take the hit. I am a boomer and would be willing to take one for the team.
 
pbrauer said:
The retirement age should be lower not raised and the cap should be significantly raised or eliminated altogether. Lowering the retirement will leave more room for younger workers.
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The idea that removing jobs will open up new jobs for other people is a completly false idea.

It's because there are two kinds of unemployment.
Demand - This is the unemployment US got today. To decrease this kind of unemployment you need to get people to get confidence in the economy again. Decreasing the labour force won't increase the confidence in the economy.

Frictional - Unemployment caused by distortions in the market. For instance a high minimum wage can prevent people from getting a job, because they can't produce minimum wage value. Tough employment laws can make employers scared of hiring, or people can educate themselves to wrong professions. By decreaseing the labour force, fricrtional unemployment won't go down.

France set a cap of 35 hours per week to decrease unemployment, and it didn't help at all. Just made people poorer and prevented them from taking more hours to be able to pay ther bills. Reducing the retirement age will only be a liability for the government.
 
Harry Guerrilla said:
It's unfair, to all income spheres, that actively save for their own retirement.
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People who save for retirement have a better standard of living. And they leave behind an estate when they die.

Harry Guerrilla said:
Not to mention, a major rip off, if you die before retirement age.
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It's an insurance program. Insurance is always a ripoff until you need it.
 
Korimyr the Rat said:
People who save for retirement have a better standard of living. And they leave behind an estate when they die.
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Except it could be much better if they were allowed to retain their SS contributions.

Korimyr the Rat said:
It's an insurance program. Insurance is always a ripoff until you need it.
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You can't insure against something that is going to happen for the vast majority of people.
That's insane and doesn't make any sense at all.

Disability, yea that can be insured againt.
 
digsbe said:
Why not allow people to opt out of social security and be the masters of their own retirement?
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Because many people will do so, not taking a long view, and then upon retirement suddenly become welfare burdens. And if you're worried about social security becoming bankrupt now, just imagine it when half the people aren't contributing.

The best solution is one that will never get passed:

1. Raise the retirement age as life expectancy increases; and

2. Limit social security to those in need (millionaires don't need that extra couple of hundred bucks a month).
 
The reason I am torn is my grandparents. They were farmers all their life, incredibly frugal, saved constantly. The most money they ever spent was on their grandkids. Then my grandfather was hit with prostate cancer and eventually passed away. That wiped them out quite a bit. Then my grandmother, living on her own started getting amounting health cost, wiped her out for the most part now she lives off of medicaid and SSI. Some people genuinely just need it, and could have tried very hard to make sure they didn't have to rely on it (they were both straight up and down conservative Republicans) but thank God she did have SSI.
 
Harry Guerrilla said:
You can't insure against something that is going to happen for the vast majority of people.
That's insane and doesn't make any sense at all.
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Sure you can. It's just a matter of how much you pay in premiums. And the original retirement age was higher than the life expectancy at the time, so the vast majority of people did not collect.
 
samsmart said:
That's it, pretty much.
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Then I don't see where the issue is.

The government's benefits are ****, anyway - minuscule - If someone wants to retire at 60 they should plan for that, square things away, and then just get the extra benefits when they're 70 or whatever the age is.

But it seems that *everyone* intends on using SS *to* be their main source when they retire - and that's just setting people up for serious disappointment. . . because for the people who are solely or mostly dependent on their SS benefits the only thing I hear are complaints about how far the money doesn't go.

Obviously, if someone wants to retire, there's more to it than *just stop working for the rest of your life* - you *must* plan for it. . . and since, after all my years, I still don't see the benefits of retiring I'll likely work until I die because I'm 30 and have yet to even graduate college, let alone carve out a decent retirement savings for myself.
 
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Korimyr the Rat said:
Sure you can. It's just a matter of how much you pay in premiums. And the original retirement age was higher than the life expectancy at the time, so the vast majority of people did not collect.
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In that case it's unjust. Why should somebody have to pay for someone else's retirement?
 
samsmart said:
What I would rather happen is that the money that people pay into SS actually go into it instead of being turned into T-bills. If the Republicans and Democrats would just use the money paid into Social Security for Social Security payouts instead of paying for other government programs, we wouldn't have to raise the retirement age.
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I discovered that at it's inception SS payments were in fact ring fenced so that they were not available to be used for other purposes, which I suppose leads to a cogent question, who removed this ring fence from around SS payments.
 
Korimyr the Rat said:
Yes, the retirement age needs to be raised, at least to 70, and we need to start having many more children.
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Regretably the Birth rate among US citizens is in decline, which I suppose is one reason for allowing immigration.
 
Actually federal income tax, SS, etc were put in place to secure the flow of profit for the federal reserve. The money for government service comes from new loans from the Fed Reserve. The Fed loans money at intrest to the government and the cycle continues.
 
TacticalEvilDan said:
I voted "no," because I've got a better idea.

In the interest of having a little honesty in our government, let's tell everybody under a particular age (say 50, for example), "Sorry, but you're never going to see a dime."

Once the last qualified recipient is dead, we give everybody the option of either keeping that portion of their weekly tax burden (which would be taxable income like something else) or sending it to an investment fund to be forever tax-free.

It's not the best solution, but our government is too broken to do any better than that.
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Nice idea, only one failing, how do you keep a future Government from deciding that the pensions pot should be for ALL the people.
Please do not tell me that this cannot happen in a Democracy, for I would tell you it already has, although rather than actually steal the pot, the government concerned taxed the pot to exhaution.
 
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