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TikTok Walmart retirement is a thing, but sure, the retirement age is too low [1]

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Date: 2023-04-08  

The opening move is to cite Germany’s national retirement benefit, first proposed by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1881: “He set the retirement age at 70. Average life expectancy at the time? About 40 years.” German average life expectancy at birth was 40 years at that point. But in the times before infant mortality was driven way down by vaccines and other medical advances, as well as improvements in nutrition, there was a big difference between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy for people who’d reached adulthood.

And Dana G. Smith, the author of this piece of propaganda for raising the retirement age knows that, because here’s what comes next: “When President Roosevelt established the Social Security Act of 1935, 65 was similarly chosen as the national retirement age, despite the fact that less than 60 percent of American adults lived that long.”

Another way of saying “less than 60%” is saying “more than 50% but I would prefer to present this in ‘less than’ terms,” and the link in that passage—from the Social Security Administration—offers a straightforward explanation of the difference between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy for working-age adults:

If we look at life expectancy statistics from the 1930s we might come to the conclusion that the Social Security program was designed in such a way that people would work for many years paying in taxes, but would not live long enough to collect benefits. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood. As Table 1 shows, the majority of Americans who made it to adulthood could expect to live to 65, and those who did live to 65 could look forward to collecting benefits for many years into the future.

Yet having linked that U.S. government website forcefully and explicitly showing that it would be wrong to “come to the conclusion that the Social Security program was designed in such a way that people would work for many years paying in taxes, but would not live long enough to collect benefits,” Smith immediately argues, “the national retirement age in the U.S. and elsewhere has origins in a bit of political smoke and mirrors; it began as a symbolic offering, accessible only to the lucky citizens who managed to survive well into old age.” This is a ragingly dishonest presentation of the history and the data, and it’s the framing of this entire piece on when people should retire, written in a political context of pressure to raise the Social Security age.

From that point, here’s the key question asked:

From an economic standpoint, a later retirement age perhaps benefits everyone’s bottom line. But putting finances aside, what are the mental and physical implications of raising a national retirement age? We asked experts to weigh in.

The answer offered first applies to the 45% of people working in “knowledge-based fields”—and here, 45% is presented as a big number, unlike that “less than 60%” previously cited as living to be old enough to claim Social Security in the program’s early years. People in those knowledge-based fields should be able to keep working until significant cognitive decline sets in, the piece suggests.

“Our cognitive faculties we’re able to maintain, usually, pretty well into our 70s,” one of the experts consulted by the Times said. “If retirement age is set based on the capabilities or competence of employees, there’s absolutely no reason to have a retirement age in the 60s.” Big “if,” but moving on.

It takes 15 paragraphs, though, to get to the reality that everyone is not working a desk job with good health care, and it never mentions declining life expectancy in the United States. A significant part of the decline is coming among people younger than 50 thanks to a host of factors like poverty, firearms, and drug overdoses, but you’d still think it would get at least a mention.

“There are people who do manual labor where at age 65, they really cannot continue to do this very challenging work,” an expert told the Times. “Their need to retire needs to be respected.” But this quote comes later in the piece than the same expert’s characterization of a retirement age of 65 as “a 20th century number.”

Additionally, “We know that Black Americans, particularly, develop illness at earlier ages, live with more disabilities, die younger,” Dr. Lisa Cooper, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, told the Times. “So not allowing them to retire until they’re older means they’re just not going to benefit from” Social Security at the same rates as white people. In the structure of this article, though, that’s an afterthought.

The fact that lots of people—maybe not all that many Times readers, but lots of people nonetheless—work at physical jobs that are increasingly painful and difficult to do well before the current retirement age should matter a lot more than it seems to to this writer and this newspaper. And the idea that retirement should not just be a matter of the convenience of employers, available only to those workers who absolutely cannot do their jobs effectively any longer, only shows up in the very final paragraphs of the piece. Nor does the article consider that, in a country that doesn’t require paid sick leave or paid parental leave, let alone paid vacations, for many people retirement is the only time in their lives they’ll have to relax and do things for themselves.

Unspoken throughout, of course, is that worrying about retirement age is not for the wealthy. The subtext is that this question of retirement age only applies to people who need Social Security to get by in retirement. With an average payment of $1,827 a month and a maximum of $4,555 (which goes only to people who spent 35 years or longer earning more than the Social Security cap currently set at $160,200, and also didn’t retire until age 70), few people can live comfortably on Social Security alone. If you’re trying to do that, it’s because working had become basically impossible; retirement was an emergency. We live in a country, after all, where TikTok Walmart retirement is a thing, with workers in their 80s finally able to retire not thanks to Social Security or, heaven knows, any kind of employer-funded pension, but thanks to people crowdfunding their retirement needs on social media.

But of course none of this would register in a piece that opened by misrepresenting the history of retirement programs and life expectancy in order to ask the very important question “How many more years of work could employers squeeze out of people without seeing the work product suffer too much?”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/8/2162489/-TikTok-Walmart-retirement-is-a-thing-but-sure-the-retirement-age-is-too-low

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