As I’ve said before raising the Social Security retirement age seems like a uniquely regressive method of decreasing entitlement spending. Indeed, a cynic might say it’s a popular solution in elite circles precisely because of how regressive it is. Larry Mishel emailed Ezra Klein with an additional factoid along these lines—increases in life expectancy have been unevenly distributed:
Very much worth keeping in mind when you hear this discussion arise. Less comfortably for fans of Social Security, the large class-linked differential in life expectancy seems to argue that dispensing a lump sum upon retirement rather than a guaranteed pension would be a distributively progressive measure.
Previous in TP Yglesias
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