The Populist Far Right and their goal to touch Social Security.

 

Eh?

I know, you're thinking, I voted for Don Trump and I sure didn't vote to eliminate retirement.

Well, first of all, Donny isn't exactly dialed in most of the time.  He's out golfing.  

That he wouldn't be dialed was obvious to those who had eyes to see.  And likewise was that the Project 2025 cabal would be running the show.

Barely noticed in all of this are the statements by far right punditry that are outright hostile to retirement, but they're there.  Comments about how "nobody should retire".  Not there?  Consider this:

And let's be real about this - it's insane that we haven't raised the retirement age in the United States. It's totally crazy. Joe Biden -- if that were the case, Joe Biden should not be running for president. OK? Joe Biden is 81 years old. The retirement age in the United States, at which you start to receive Social Security and you are eligible for Medicare, is 65. Joe Biden has technically been eligible for Social Security and Medicare for 16 years, and he wants to continue in office until he is 86, which is 19 years past when he would be eligible for retirement. No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem. Everybody that I know who is -- who is elderly, who has retired, is dead within five years. And if you talk to people who are elderly and they lose their purpose in life by losing their job and they stop working, things go to hell in a handbasket real quick.

Ben Shapiro.

Now, Shapiro was largely populist babbling, so there's an extra element of stupidity in what he said.  In the Trump era, saying really stupid stuff as a populist has become almost mandatory for that class.  But is there something to what Shapiro said?

Well yes and no.

On the yes side, a fair number of men in particular become their jobs, their souls basically a burnt out husk with nothing left, and they slip into missing their job or depression  It happens.

But like the polls that deal with lawyers who hate practicing law (a surprisingly high percentage), I suspect the figure are weighted towards confirmation bias.

Lots of people retire and love it.  

And exactly what retirement is, isn't the same for everyone.  By retirement, what quite a few people actually have is time to devote to something else they've always wanted to, but couldn't.

And that gets to this.  The current crop of Cultural Calvinists don't like the concept of retirement, as all they value in the world is work. That's it.  Work makes them part of the Elect and without work, they'd have to be human beings.  They don't want that.

So they're attacking retirement itself.  

It'll be hard to pull that off, so what they'll do is push the retirement age up closer to death.  Project 2025 would like the "full" Social Security age to be 69, up two from 67, which was up two from 65.  At some point they'll start moving the bottom age upwards.  And their argument, which at least makes fiscal sense, is that this is necessary to save the fund.

My guess is that within a decade the full will be 70, and the lower something like 67.

The dirty little secret, however, is that starting in a person's late 50s, an increasingly number simply can't carry on at work.  The average retirement age in the US right now falls between 61 and 64, with layoffs and health playing into that.

And a good argument can be made that for some jobs, those requiring a license, the retirement age really ought to be something like 60.