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Raise Retirement Age?
Maybe for some groups but not for others
Yet again politicians have screwed the rest of us. The latest? They are talking about raising retirement ages because social security is going to go bankrupt. The reason? Because politicians have, for generations, refused to fix it.
There was supposed to be a “lock box”. Except the politicians raided it long ago, if it ever really existed.
Plus, as anyone who has ever invested their money knows, social security has a lousy rate of return. It’s something like 2%, whereas the stock market delivers between 7–9% annually over time.
If workers had been required to invest a portion of their income into index funds, they could have amassed real money.
In fact, that was behind the Bush era proposal made by Republican Senator Phil Gramm. A portion of everyone’s social security fund would be put into an index fund that they would have ownership of.
One injustice his proposal addressed was to black men. Because of their low life expectancy, they often do not collect on social security despite having paid into it during their working lives.
The Gramm proposal would have given them ownership of the part that was invested, which meant they could leave it to their families. That would have allowed for…
