Raising the Retirement Age

I received an e-mail a couple of days ago from the Daily Kos urging me to sign a petition pledging that I will never support raising the retirement age or privatizing social security.

I’m afraid that this is one petition I will pass up. Since I’m in my mid-50s, I’m not that excited about seeing the retirement age raised, but life expectancy has increased a great deal since the retirement age was established, and we have good reason to believe that it will continue to increase. In the face of that, I can see no doubt that we will have to raise the retirement age sometime. Actually, even though it will get to me relatively soon, I think we’re already at that point. You cannot continue indefinitely to support a larger and larger percentage of the population based on the incomes of a smaller and smaller percentage.

I do agree that such a change will result in increased need for disability payments. That will reduce the expected savings.