The Retirement Age Is Changing, But Not for the People Who Need…

Here's a number that should bother you more than it does: 67. That's the full retirement age for anyone born in 1960 or later. Miss it, and your Social Security check gets permanently docked. Hit it, and you get the full amount you're "owed." Simple, right? Except it isn't simple at all, and the people selling you the simple version have a stake in you not looking too closely. Let's start with the basics. In 1983, a commission led by Alan Greenspan convinced Congress to gradually raise the retirement age from 65 to 67. The pitch was actuarial: we're living longer, so we should work longer. Fair enough on paper. But "we" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. A 65-year-old man in 1940 could expect to live about 12.7 more years. Today, a 65-year-old man can expect roughly 19 more years. Sounds like a windfall. Now break it down by income. A high-earning American can expect to spend two decades in retirement. A low-wage worker often gets closer to twelve. The extra years of life landed disproportionately on people who already had comfortable jobs, good healthcare, and the luxury of not wearing out their knees by 55. So we raised the age for everyone, as if everyone got the same longevity bonus. The people who benefit from that framing are the ones writing the checks. Every year the retirement age rises, the trust fund gets a little breathing room. It's a quiet benefit cut that doesn't show up as a cut. Now the political class is floating 68, 69, even 70. "Nobody's talking about cutting benefits," they'll say, "just adjusting the retirement age." That's the oldest trick in the book: change the definition of the benefit and claim the benefit is untouched. Who benefits from you retiring later? Employers get a larger labor pool of older workers who can't afford to quit. Wall Street gets more years of contributions flowing into a system whose surplus it has been eyeing for decades. Politicians get to dodge the word "cut" while quietly cutting. The only losers are the people who paid in for forty years and now need a doctor's note to prove they're tired. There's also a cruel irony buried in the math. Americans are not, in fact, living longer anymore. Life expectancy fell during the pandemic and has only partially recovered. Meanwhile, the working class is dying younger from what economists politely call "deaths of despair." Raising the retirement age based on 1980s longevity projections is like planning a road trip using last decade's gas prices. None of this means Social Security is a scam or that it's going bankrupt tomorrow. It means the conversation is rigged before it starts. The people who set the retirement age will never depend on it. The people who depend on it will never set the retirement age. So the next time someone tells you we need to raise the retirement age to "save" the program, ask them a simple question: save it for whom? The honest answer is that Social Security's retirement age has always been a political number disguised as an actuarial one. If we're going to change it again, the burden should fall on the people who can carry it, not the ones who were already carrying everything else.