April 24, 2016
Neil Irwin had a good piece in the Upshot section of the NYT pointing out that the growing gap in life expectancies for rich and poor have made Social Security a less progressive program. He argues that this is a good reason not to consider increases in the Social Security retirement ages as a way to reduce the projected shortfall in funding.
This is true, but there is also a further reason that raising retirement ages would be regressive. Lower income people are far more likely to work at physically demanding jobs. A recent paper by Cherrie Bucknor found that 81.4 percent of older workers (over age 58) with less than a high school degree and 61.0 percent of those with a high school degree worked at jobs that were either physically demanding or in difficult workers conditions, this was true for only 29.4 percent of those with college degrees and 20.4 percent of those with advanced degrees.
The basic story is that it might not be any big deal for a lawyer or an economist to work until they are 70 or beyond, it might be considerably harder for a custodian or a waitress. We can run into serious problems when our retirement policy is designed by lawyers and economists who think that everyone has jobs like theirs.
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