A GOP Plan To Raise the Retirement Age Reveals How Unserious Washington Is About Social Security

An obvious, tepid reform was greeted with shrill partisan screeching.

A Republican budget plan released Wednesday included one of the most obvious, low-hanging ideas for shoring up Social Security: Raising the eligibility age for benefits from 67 to 69.

That idea was included within a 180-page budget plan released by the House Republican Study Committee (RSC), a policy-focused group that includes most but not all members of the House GOP. Proposals released by the RSC are in many ways similar to the president's annual budget request: an aspirational document that reflects big-picture agreement on important issues, but not necessarily an actionable plan that can be passed into law.

So the call for raising the retirement age by two years—a change that the RSC plan says wouldn't even be implemented in the short-term to spare Americans currently approaching Social Security eligibility—would barely even be accurately described as a first step. It's also not a novel or surprising development: upping the eligibility age has been a part of the discussion about Social Security since at least the George W. Bush administration.

Which is why what happened next is particularly illustrative.

The White House immediately blasted the proposal for trying to raise the retirement age and reiterated the promise Biden made at the State of the Union address to block any proposed cuts to Social Security.

Other Democrats pounced, and left‐leaning media jumped aboard the messaging train. Slate dedicated hundreds of words to analyzing the potential electoral consequences of the proposal with nary a mention of the policy substance or how Democrats plan to address Social Security's looming insolvency. Meanwhile, The New Republic described the higher retirement age as "a plan to gut Social Security" without explaining how, exactly, the program would be gutted by a reform that puts it on more stable fiscal footing.

Indeed, even some Republicans quickly threw the higher retirement age idea under the bus.

"Horrible idea. Totally opposed to this," Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) told The Hill.  "Republicans are so stupid. If they want to go to working people and say, 'Congratulations, you have paid into this your whole life—your payroll taxes—and now we're going to take part of it away from you, we're going to make you work even longer than we said beforehand,' I just think that's the stupidest thing I ever heard."

Look, I get it. It's 2024, and the only thing that matters is the Electoral College scoreboard. But following the polls and looking no farther ahead than the next election is how politicians have squandered three decades that could have been used to make changes that averted Social Security's insolvency, which the program has been warning about since the mid-1990s.

It's important to keep in mind that if you're someone interested in maintaining Social Security as a functioning program, the real threat isn't from proposed changes but from doing nothing. The trustees that oversee Social Security estimate that benefits will be cut by 23 percent starting in 2033, with further cuts needed in future years, unless policymakers make changes to the program's fundamental math.

"Virtually every serious person who works on Social Security policy knows the eligibility age must eventually rise higher," Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and expert on the broken math that is pushing America's entitlement programs into a death spiral, told Reason. "That said, partisan reform blueprints only attract partisan demagoguery and poison the well for reform."

All things considered, raising the retirement age by a mere two years is a rather tepid reform—one that arguably ought to be opposed for not going far enough, and one that certainly won't fix Social Security's problems by itself.

A more ambitious proposal would phase out Social Security entirely, allow younger workers to handle their own retirement planning via private investments, and implement a federal safety net program to keep elderly Americans from falling into destitution. After facing decades of uncertainty about whether they will receive Social Security benefits, Americans should be glad to have politics removed from their retirement planning and be able to handle their own assets.

But if a modest, obvious reform is going to be greeted with a caterwaul of partisan demagoguery as Democrats seek to claim an electoral advantage and that sends populist Republicans scurrying away from their party's own plans? That says more about the current state of fiscal policy than anything you'll actually find in the GOP's proposal.