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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Politics
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Why should we be punished if life expectancy goes up? Nobody should have to work until they're too old to fully enjoy life.
That's literally the opposite of what I said
That's how I interpreted it too. Just because we're living longer doesn't mean our capacity for work is stretching further. My knees are already going out and I'm not near retirement age. I don't want to be stuck working longer, hating every moment of it, knowing that all this means is now I won't actually get to enjoy retirement
To play devil's advocate, when Social Security was established (bringing with it the concept of a "retirement age"), the age of eligibility was deliberately set such that less than half of Americans would live long enough to draw on it. The clear expectation was that you would work until you couldn't anymore.
That said, in an era when changes in life expectancy are starting to take on a K-shaped distribution and labor force participation has been on a long steady decline, tying governmental income support to age and employment duration is becoming distributionally regressive. I'd much rather have some sort of UBI system that everyone can benefit from.