If you want to stir the pot a little bit, these are good reasons to lower the retirement age.
Your email pal,
Tom L.
Michael Brun wrote:
> Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 19:46:06 -0500
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: elegant reasoning
>
> >From the Cato Institute's Social Security Project
> <http://www.socialsecurity.org>:
>
> "Since blacks and the poor have shorter life spans than whites and
> high-income earners, Social Security transfers money from blacks to whites
> and from the poor to the rich, a reverse Robin Hood program. Since the
> median life expectancy for a black male born today is only 65.8 years, half
> of all black men will never collect a single retirement check from Social
> Security. Only a personalized Social Security system can end this
> discrimination."
> -- Joel Mowbray
> CURE
>
> Is the median life expectancy for black (why only males?) males taken all
> together the same as the median life expectancy for those black males
> participating in the social security system? I bet the answer is no, the
> latter live longer. Count in females and the game is up for CATO. Just
> goes to show, there are millions of numbers out there; so go ahead and pick
> the ones you want.
>
> Now if CATO had chosen to address the regressivity of the Social Security
> tax, why then they'd be on to something. I wonder how they could have
> missed that.
>
> Michael Brun