Raising the US retirement age would result in severe reduction in Social Security payments

The gap in Social Security has been a hot topic of debate for a few years now. Lawmakers have come up with many ways to fix the problem, but none of them have been widely accepted and passed.

Many people have suggested that the full retirement age should be raised by two years, to 69, in order to make the program last past 2034. However, experts are not sure if this would really help.

The current full retirement age for people born in 1960 or later is 67. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that raising the age to 69 would mean that people would get less money over their lifetime. The plan would also raise other ages as well.

The youngest age at which someone can claim Social Security would stay at 62, but the oldest age at which they could get the most money from Social Security would rise to 72.

This information was made public after Democratic Rep. Brendan is the ranking member of the House committee on the budget and serves Pennsylvania’s 2nd District. He asked if the plan would work.

The CBO said that if the current plan to raise the retirement age to 67 years and three months for workers born in 1965 and then another three months for each birth year until it reached 69 for workers born in 1972 is kept up, the government would still go bankrupt at the same time and workers’ benefits would be cut at the same rate, making sure that they get even less over their lifetime.

Researchers found that workers born in 1972 would lose 40% of their benefits if they claimed Social Security at the earliest possible age of 62.

Under present law, claiming early only loses 30% of benefits. People born in the 1970s would not benefit from the rise in the full retirement age.

They are the first generation of born beneficiaries who would be harmed by the change. The average check for these people would have 13% less money in it than it does now, and workers from the 1980s would also see similar cuts.

What would the change mean for the Social Security coffers?

In theory, raising the full retirement age would help keep Social Security costs down, and the math backs this up.

However, raising the full retirement age slowly would not change the current prediction that the trust funds that support Social Security will run out in 2034; any changes to the full retirement age would be put into place after the fund is already empty.

According to Henry Aaron, a senior fellow in the economics studies program at the Brookings Institution, the change in the full retirement age would only affect people who are new to Social Security. It would not affect people who are already on the program.

As things stand, recipients would only get about 5% of all spending in the future if the change is made now. This is not enough to help the Trust avoid going bankrupt.

Richard Johnson, senior fellow and director of the program on retirement policy at the Urban Institute, agrees with the assessment.

This is especially true when you consider that the change would have to be made gradually so that it is fair to current retirees and people who are about to become eligible for benefits.

It would make some workers feel like they were taken advantage of if the full retirement age was changed today and some people quickly lost their access to benefits.