A Republican budget plan released Wednesday included one of the most obvious and within-reach ideas for bolstering Social Security: raising the eligibility age for benefits from 67 to 69.
This idea was included in a 180-page budget plan released by the House Republican Study Committee (RSC), a policy-focused group that includes most but not all House GOP members. The proposals released by the RSC are in many ways similar to the president’s annual budget request: an ambitious document that reflects general agreement on important issues, but not necessarily an actionable plan that can be signed into law.
So the call to raise the retirement age by two years — a change that the RSC plan says wouldn’t even be implemented in the short term to spare Americans currently approaching Social Security eligibility — would barely be accurately described as a first step. Furthermore, this is not a new or surprising development: Raising the eligibility age has been a part of the Social Security discussion at least since the George W. Bush administration.
That’s why what happened next is particularly illustrative.
The White House immediately criticized the proposal to try to raise the retirement age and reiterated Biden’s promise in his State of the Union address to block any proposed cuts to Social Security.
More Democrats pounced, and left-wing media jumped aboard the message train. Slate he devoted hundreds of words to analyzing the proposal’s potential electoral consequences without mentioning the policy substance or how Democrats plan to address the looming Social Security insolvency. In the meantime, The New Republic he described the higher retirement age as “a plan to gut Social Security” without explaining how, exactly, the program would be gutted by a reform that puts it on a more stable fiscal footing.
Indeed, even some Republicans quickly threw the idea of a higher retirement age by the wayside.
“A horrible idea. Totally opposed to this,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). The hill. “Republicans are so stupid. If they want to go to working people and say, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been paying your whole life – payroll taxes – and now we’re going to take some of that away from you, we’re going to make you work even longer than we had said before, ‘I just think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Look, I get it. It’s 2024 and the only thing that matters is the electoral college scoreboard. But following polls and not looking beyond the next election is how politicians have wasted three decades that could have been used to make changes that would avoid the insolvency of Social Security, which the program has been warning about since the mid-1990s. ’90.
It’s important to keep in mind that if you’re interested in maintaining Social Security as a functioning program, the real threat comes not from proposed changes but from doing nothing. Administrators who oversee Social Security estimate that benefits will be cut by 23% starting in 2033, with further cuts needed in future years unless politicians make changes to the program’s core calculations.
“Virtually every serious person who works on Social Security policy knows that the eligibility age will eventually have to rise,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an expert on the broken bills that are pushing America’s entitlement programs into a tailspin. deadly spiral. Reason. “That said, partisan reform projects only attract partisan demagogy and poison the well of reform.”
All in all, raising the retirement age by just two years is a rather tepid reform, one that should probably be resisted because it didn’t go far enough, and one that certainly won’t solve Social Security’s problems on its own.
A more ambitious proposal would eliminate Social Security entirely, allow younger workers to manage their own retirement planning through private investments and implement a federal safety net program to keep older Americans from falling into poverty. After facing decades of uncertainty about whether they will be able to receive Social Security benefits, Americans should be pleased to see the policy removed from their retirement planning and to be able to manage their assets.
But if a modest and obvious reform is met with a whine of partisan demagogy as Democrats try to claim an electoral advantage and that sends populist Republicans running away from their party’s plans? That says more about the current state of tax policy than anything you might actually find in the GOP proposal.