Every politician worthy of the name knows that the easiest policy changes to put over are those that don’t kick in until well into the future. The idea, of course, is that by the time their dire ramifications become evident, they’ll be someone else’s problem.
That must be why it has become so fashionable in Washington to propose raising the Social Security retirement age.
This nostrum is an element of the “Roadmap for America’s Future” promoted by Rep. Paul D. Ryan, D-Wis. (who calls it, with Orwellian duplicity, “modernizing” the retirement age). In recent weeks it has also been embraced by such Democrats as House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, who said “we should consider a higher retirement age or one pegged to lifespan,” and Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, who proposes raising the retirement age by one month every year.
President Barack Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission is believed to be toying with the retirement age change as part of its Social Security plan. We don’t really know, because the deliberations of its Social Security working group are taking place behind closed doors. So much for “open government.”
“I’d call retirement age the leading issue” in discussions about Social Security finances, said Nancy J. Altman, a longtime expert on pension issues who is co-director of Social Security Works, a Washington advocacy group for the program.
It’s obvious that the promoters of this idea haven’t thought carefully about its consequences. But they do know that those consequences are conveniently distant, so who cares?
Leaving aside that the urge to “fix” Social Security is based on a raft of misconceptions and deliberate misrepresentations about its fiscal health, the so-called reformers always specify that nothing they propose would affect current retirees or those 55 and older.
Much of the rest of the population, they’re aware, already has been trained by decades of anti-Social Security propaganda to doubt that the program will be around to serve their own retirements, so, again, who cares?…
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