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It’s one part of the American dream — you work, you put in your hours week after week, year after year, and, eventually (or once you hit 65), you get to retire, collect Social Security and live it up in Miami (or somewhere less oppressive, even!) with your ditzy friend, your slutty friend, and your mom who is actually younger than you are in real life.
Or whomever you’re married to, I suppose.
Of course, many Millennials are already pretty sure that they’ll never actually be able to retire (especially since the latest estimate is that they will need at least $3 million saved in order to retire comfortably) — but it’s not something anyone is too happy about.
On Tuesday’s edition of The Daily Wire’s The Ben Shapiro Show, Shapiro suggested that instead of retiring and spending one’s remaining years taking it easy, Americans should just work until they are dead.
“And let’s be real about this — it’s insane that we haven’t raised the retirement age in the United States. It’s totally crazy. Joe Biden — if that were the case, Joe Biden should not be running for president. Okay? Joe Biden is 81 years old. The retirement age in the United States, at which you start to receive Social Security and you are eligible for Medicare, is 65. Joe Biden has technically been eligible for Social Security and Medicare for 16 years, and he wants to continue in office until he is 86, which is 19 years past when he would be eligible for retirement. No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem.”
I like how his understanding of retirement is that it is something people do because they are no longer able to meaningfully contribute to the economy and not because people deserve to be able to have some time to just enjoy life.
I suppose if everyone got to be president — or even if they were able, like Ben Shapiro, to rake in millions just by spending their days doubting the existence of vaginal lubrication and complaining about the Barbie movie — that would be one thing. But most people don’t really want to keel over at their desk or on a manufacturing line at the age of 90.
“But put all of that aside, just on a fiscal level and on a logical level, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt established 65 as the retirement age, the average life expectancy in the United States was 63 years old. Today, the average life expectancy in the United States is close to 80. It’s totally insane that you believe that you should be able to work from the time that you are essentially 20 to the time that you are 65 — which is a 45 year period — pay in, and then you’ll receive Social Security benefits sufficient to support you and your family, you and your wife or whatever, for, like, another 20 years. That’s crazy talk. That is not fiscally sustainable. The notion that if you have to raise the retirement age to 67 or 68, that everyone is gonna fall apart — my parents are that age. My parents are not retired, and they shouldn’t retire. It would be very bad for them to retire.”
You all are educated and smart about things, so we may not need to point out that people who lived past childhood (and didn’t die in childbirth) generally had about the same life expectancies we have today. You can ask the Social Security Administration!
Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood.
Now we can get back to yelling at Ben Shapiro.
In France, they just raised the retirement age from 62 to 64 and there were practically riots. Granted, that wouldn’t happen here because we are far more inured to misery, but people wouldn’t be too happy about it either. More Shapiro, although why we do this to ourselves, I don’t know!
“By the way, it’s disrespectful to people who are 67, 68, 69 years old to suggest that they are in the same shape as people who are 65 — were in 1940. It’s not true at all. Have you met a 65-year-old lately? Sixty-five-year-olds are not old in the United States. They’re not. Sixty-eight-year-olds are not old in the United States. Again, Joe Biden thinks he’s not old, and that dude is running for president again, and that dude actually is old, and he’s 81. I fail to see how a country in which our entire leadership class is 80-plus is telling you that we should have a retirement age of 65. It makes no sense at all.”
Because, again, it’s not about not being able to work, it’s not about what shape old people are in or whether or not they are useful to employers, it’s about the fact that they should not have to work. And they shouldn’t.
It’s also worth noting here that part of the reason why it’s been so difficult financially for Millennials is because so many Baby Boomers have taken their sweet time getting around to retiring and there just hasn’t been as much room for advancement. There are a finite number of jobs (especially, as people love to remind us, with automation and AI) and if people don’t retire, there won’t be as much need to hire younger people.
People are working much later in life than they once were — 19 percent of those over 65 are still working, quadruple the number still working in the 1980s, and nine percent of people over 75 are still working, which is double what it was then. It’s probably not because they just love what they do so much (of course for some it is!) as they simply can’t afford to retire — and that’s bad for a lot of reasons.
Sure, we could all just give up and go with Ben Shapiro’s plan of getting rid of Social Security and working ourselves into an early grave, or we could start talking about how to better support seniors now so that people can retire comfortably (and without needing to have saved $3 million).
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