A few day's ago I wrote about the seeming consensus in Congress for raising the retirement age for Social Security, and highlighted Pelosi's concerns.
When asked about it by TPMDC at her press conference last week, she criticized the plan, but mainly to say she disagrees with putting Social Security on the chopping block ahead of other measures. "Why they would start talking about a place that could be harmful to our seniors -- 70 is a relative age," Pelosi said. "Around here, there's not a lot of outdoor work or heavy lifting. But for some people it is, and 70 means something different to them. So in any event let's talk about growth, lets talk about how we can reduce spending, lets put everything, those initiatives: promoting growth, tightening the belt, looking at entitlements. But let's not start on the backs of our seniors."
Ezra has some pretty convincing evidence of that very problem.
Larry Mishel writes in with another argument for why raising the Social Security age makes much more sense for affluent individuals who work in knowledge-oriented industries than for lower-income people whose jobs require more physical labor. If the argument is that life expectancy is rocketing upwards, and that retirement shouldn't grow along with it, it's important to point out that the increases in life expectancy aren't being shared equally.
Then he shows this chart:
That's small, but what it shows is that life expectancy for male workers in the bottom half of earners has raised just two years from 1972 to 2001, from 77.7 to 79.6. For the top half of earners--the people who aren't doing a lot of outdoor work or heavy lifting, as Pelosi described it, life expectancy increased from 78.9 to 85.4.
Ezra continues:
[Y]ou often hear that if we raise the FICA cap so that wealthier individuals have to pay more for Social Security, they'll start putting a lot of time and energy into tax avoidance. But it's similarly predictable that an increase in the retirement age will lead to more people going on disability. I don't know if that will be more or less expensive than tax avoidance, but it's worth considering.
Finally, a fair number of elderly leave the labor force because their job disappears, and hiring discrimination against older workers is rampant. If we're going to increase the age at which these folks can get full Social Security benefits, we'd better figure out some solutions to make it easier for them to keep working.
Both of those arguments are important. It's very likely that for those people who do the heavy lifting, continuing to do their jobs until they're 70 just won't be physically possible and they'd be forced onto disability. On his second point, older people do face job discrimination, which is evidenced by the very high rate of long-term unemployment in the 45 and older cohort.