The retirement age should be around 80. When the age was first set, average life expectancy was about 45-50. The vast majority were never expected to get SS. It was also meant as a supplement as opposed to being one’s only means of support. Additionally, SS is at least theoretically separate from the rest of the budget, wit separate funding schemes. Granted, it was designed as an unsupportable Ponzi scheme, but we are faced with that unfortunate fact regardless of what we do about the income tax.
I could easily support IRA-like mechanisms to get folks to take more responsibility for their own retirement. The whole issue of SS is a major can of worms because of the propaganda that has consistently been spread about it essentially since day one.
Gee a a guy has been a roofer his whole life, good to seem them swing a hammer on a 12/12 pitched roof at 80.. Good idea.
> “The retirement age should be around 80.”
Sorry, doesn’t stand a chance unless you can pull a Mussolini act. More on this later.
The practical way of getting to the goal is to first clip the IRS into a very small unit by freezing new hires and reassigning the millions to other areas such as border control operations. This is the Ted Cruz position.
With a small unit of about 25,000 federal workers remaining in the IRS, they may be eliminated from working entirely from Income Tax Code operations and reassigned to provide services to consumption tax code operations working with state collection units.