The long-term stability of Social Security is supposedly a top concern in Washington, and a hotly debated subject on which politicians are actively struggling to find common ground.
That is, at least, what Washington tells voters.
The problem with this story is there is no visible sign of any functioning debate on the program’s future. There is virtually no residue of thought that typically comes from a robust debate.
Read: Inflation adjustments won’t save you from paying taxes on 85% of your Social Security benefit
To illustrate, Rep. Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who is now the House speaker, told C-SPAN last year: “If you tell 30-year-olds, 35-year-old workers, that they will get [Social Security] at 67 instead of 65, for example, you can dramatically change the trajectory of the sustainability of those programs.”
Someone should have told Johnson that the retirement age of Social Security hasn’t been 65 in two decades, and most of these workers already realize that they will “get it” at 67.
Read: What House Speaker Mike Johnson has said about Social Security and Medicare
So much for the narrative of a hotly debated topic. If a politician can’t spell potato, he is chased from public life. If a lawmaker is grossly misinformed on the state of a program on which we all depend, no one really cares.
More troubling for the guy who is approaching retirement: Johnson, now 51, reasoned that “when Social Security was created in the ’60s, the average lifespan was somewhere in the mid-70s. Now people live to 100 routinely, so they are on the program for decades.”
The congressman is comparing two different statistics. One is life expectancy at birth, and the other reflects life expectancy at retirement. While these concepts might sound similar, the comparison is flawed because the measure at birth is driven by the decline in infant mortality.
Unfortunately, Johnson’s detachment from the issue of Social Security is not all that uncommon in Washington. He is a powerful politician who is unaware of his own retirement age, the impact of his ideas, or the reasoning for them. Despite all of the gaps in his understanding of challenges presented by Social Security, he has risen to the House speakership and sits second in line to succeed the president.
Johnson’s office did not respond to requests for clarity.
The real message to the average voter? Wake up, folks. It is entirely possible for politicians to get to the Oval Office without any material understanding of the mechanics, history or problems faced by the program on which most Americans rely.
The debate about the program isn’t hot. It is not even coherent.
Washington needs to stop trying to eat the elephant all at once. Lawmakers need to look at common-sense adjustments to the program and debate those changes in a public forum. Indexing the retirement age is an example. It wouldn’t solve everything, but it could be part of the larger solution.
Johnson’s statement on C-SPAN about raising the retirement age serves as an excellent starting point for reform. If Washington is unable to incorporate the impact of changes in longevity into Social Security, it is only reasonable to index the retirement age. With indexing, the system would set your age of eligibility based on your life expectancy at retirement and the number of years in your career.
Read: Opinion: Republican Social Security plans don’t add up
To illustrate, someone who turns 67 in 2030 expects to live another 19 years in retirement. That person would have, in theory, a career of 45 years (67 minus 22), meaning for every 2.3 years of work, he or she would expect to collect a year of retirement benefits. The mechanics of this process are theoretically the same as Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment, which automatically bumps the size of checks to protect the buying power of the benefit.
This change would not reduce benefits. In fact, it solves 19% of the financial imbalances by holding lifetime benefit levels roughly the same for all workers. As people expect to live longer, they should contribute more as workers to earn those additional checks. That is simple common sense.
If indexes to retirement age were implemented gradually, the retirement age of workers wouldn’t reach 70 in this century. The public forum would give those Republicans who want to increase the retirement age to 70 an opportunity to explain why the formula is incorrect.
On the other side of the aisle, there are lawmakers arguing to hold the age constant — forever. That might be reasonable in some ways, provided workers understand that more benefits only come with a higher payroll-tax rate. Instead the politicians of the day advocate for the status quo, and the crisis that comes with it.
There is no room in the existing framework for reasoned discussion. Lawmakers are so far apart that no one is listening to the opposition. This is why Republicans continue to believe that the retirement age in Social Security is still 65. It explains why Democrats want to hold the line on retirement age without talking about the concept of earned benefits.
Once Congress no longer controls the age at which seniors are eligible, maybe lawmakers would have more time to work on the rest of the program — and the remaining 81% of the crisis.
Brenton Smith is a policy adviser to the Heartland Institute.
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