Somehow, raising the retirement age to 68 by 2050 doesn’t seem like much of a fix.
This is baloney.
There should be statistics somewhere showing the number of disabled Medicare recipients, under the qualifying age of 65.
Also ‘double dippers’ who had both Federal employment and private sector employment.
http://www.governing.com/columns/public-money/FICA-free-lunch-crowd.html
Double-dipping. Employees in these outlier states and localities can still collect Social Security benefits for work they do outside their government service. So firefighters can collect Social Security credits for their side jobs as construction workers, plumbers or electricians. Even without moonlighting, the notorious “early-in-early-out” retirees who pull down full pensions from these systems at the ages of 50 or 55 can readily collect 10 years of Social Security credits in a second career, and double-dip the two systems. Occupations with earlier retirement options are heavily weighted in the FICA-exempt sub-group, so the second-career double-dip scenario is quite common. Typically, their public pensions exceed those of workers paying into Social Security: Because the employer and the employees don’t have to pay FICA taxes, they can pay more into the pension plan. Then the double-dippers can add duplicative Social Security benefits and play the two systems against each other. They get their cake and eat it too.
(there’s more - very interesting and irritating)
Yep...SS will still be broke. They need to phase it out, but if they plan to keep it they need to set it up like it was originally designed. You’d be long dead before you ever see any of that money. They need to set it to the life expectancy +3 years.
Somehow, raising the retirement age to 68 by 2050 doesn’t seem like much of a fix.