Opinion: Social Security and Medicare retirement age raise would be wrong

Editor’s Note: Christopher Howard is the Pamela C. Harriman Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary. He is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Scholars Strategy Network. His latest book is “Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are the writer’s own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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Social Security and Medicare need to be reformed in the next decade, and some of those changes will be difficult. These programs won’t ever go bankrupt, as many fear, but officials must find ways to collect more revenues or cut spending in order to keep Social Security and Medicare on sound fiscal footing. Basically, they have to figure out how to spread the pain.

One option being discussed is raising the retirement age. Republicans such as Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace and presidential candidate Nikki Haley have recently proposed doing that. Last year a group of House Republicans called for increasing the retirement age to 70 for Social Security and Medicare, then indexing it to life expectancy. Republicans are not alone — according to Semaphor, a bipartisan group of senators is reportedly trying to devise a reform package for Social Security, with a higher retirement age as a prominent option.

Raising the retirement age seems to make economic sense on the surface of things. It would generate more revenue as payroll taxes would be collected for a longer period of time, and it would reduce the amount of benefits paid. This option has been used before — the Social Security Amendments of 1983 made several changes to the program, and one of the most important was gradually increasing the retirement age from 65 to 67.

The most common justification for the age hike is that Americans are living longer than their parents and grandparents. Increasing the retirement age to 68, 70 or higher looks like a rational adjustment.

However, this option has a serious flaw. Life expectancies in this country vary a lot by race and class. Raising the retirement age would disproportionately hurt Black Americans and people with lower incomes because they have shorter life expectancies. A higher retirement age is morally suspect because it discriminates…