POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

The “right” to retirement

Too lazy to look up the link, but I recall a recent article about some “right to vacation” being bandied about in Europe [before the whole Grecian meltdown....I think. I wouldn't put it past the “intelligentsia” of Brussels to consider vacation welfare during a massive economic crisis].

To Americans, this was obviously absurd.

But the “right” to retirement is equally absurd, and yet many buy into it. There's a “right” to retirement as much as there's a “right” to a couple weeks on the French Riviera.

I'm not that old, and I'm not a historian, but I find it a wonder that Victor Davis Hanson doesn't just lose it some days, listening to the various whining about how awful it is that 70-year-olds may have to be Walmart greeters.

Look, people. We've got it =great=. We are not dropping like flies in our middle age from strokes and heart disease, as once was more common, and while various infectious diseases are making a comeback, children in the developed world have a 99% chance of making it to adulthood. Historically, there was no such thing as retirement – you worked til you died or fell apart, and in the second case, you better have made sure you had some family to take care of you (though also there were religious groups who would also care for the decrepit, family was the go-to source).

With an advanced economy, people could actually save up some wealth during their productive years, and then enjoy a modest life without necessarily having a large family to support them, though again, once you were decrepit, it helped to have a spinster daughter or a loyal daughter-in-law to take good care of you.

It's not as if the hoi polloi were RVing, going on cruises, living in senior communities in Arizona, taking college classes, etc. back in “Ye Good Olde Days”. The old have it pretty sweet in this society.

Especially since most people still retire when they're not that old – looking up the stats from the Social Security Administration, most people take benefits at their earliest age of eligibility (62), and almost all have started taking it by Medicare age (65). Very few wait til the Normal Retirement Age (now 66, will be 67 for me...but that's where it stops... needs another law for it to adjust even higher). Extremely few wait til the oldest age (70 – you're forced to start taking benefits at that age).

Just using Social Security tables from a few years ago, expected age at death, given you've made it to age 65, is around 85-ish for women and 79-ish for men. So one goes from a situation where you might be alive for a couple years after “retirement” to being around for almost 2 decades.

Now, nothing wrong with retiring early, but those who want to should save up for it.

Just as it was a bad idea to encourage people to buy homes who didn't have the fiscal discipline to save up for even a modest downpayment, it's not a good idea to encourage early retirement amongst those
who don't bother to save up for it. The best encouragement to save is to boost the retirement age well beyond where it is now, set at a place to protect the decrepit (there's always been the Disability portion of Social Security to protect those who really can't work – so if age at earliest eligibility is boosted, we'll see more people taking the disability benefit. But still, it would set an expectation.)

Some recent pension and retirement links:

• VIDEO: Author Roger Lowenstein on pension
  issues
• NYT: Rich pension benefits in Yonkers, NY - a good read, explains the situation for NY pensions
• Mark Hemingway: when a public pension is a taxpayer-paid trust fund -remarking on the above NYT story
• Ed Mendel: an overview of the options in California for pension reform, current budget

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

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