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I believe 65 was a fairly arbitrary retirement age for civil servants in Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm, and for some reason, became a norm.
Posters are correct about "average" ages being skewed by infant mortality. A more accurate assessment is by how many years a person can be expected to live IF reaching the age of five alive, and then IF reaching the age of 65. The life years after 65 have indeed been increasing in the U.S., with some differences for race and gender (and certainly economics).
But with the obesity and consequent diabetes epidemic already here, actual average life expectancies will probably go back down again. The tables are based on what have become a lot of false assumptions given what is actually happening to the average person's health.
A better guesstimate is your own lifestyle and health plus the longevity of your near relatives.
No there have always been health problems with many undiscovered in the past. How people get diagonised earlier and survive much longer.The numbers for diseses will probaly go up but so will the people surviving go up.Its just a fact that people are living longer and even younger people that would ahve died years ago ;are surviving deadly accidents and diseases.
Let's not forget all of those people treating SSI like welfare because they are "disabled."
I agree, there are several people abusing the SSI program when they could work but don't. Some People do get caught by field investigators who use surveillence to determine fraud. It's those people who ruin it for the rest that really do need it and can't work at all. It is unfortunate that we all are forced to pay into the SSI system but probably won't see it when it comes time for us to collect what we've put in. We all need to take this seriously and invest in our future some how that fits our needs.
As has been done before something will come along to "fix it" because there are 55 million, FIFTY-FIVE MILLION, people on Medicare and they wouldn't dare vote, would they?
And yes, millions are living much longer today then when social security first went into effect but "The Social Security Act of 1935 set the initial tax rate at 2% combined". 1% for employee and 1% for employer. Today it is over 15% combined.
Message to dumbocrats and repukikans, there are to many senior citizens who rely on this and the last thing you want to do is **** em off.
Yep, the first 34 posts in this thread were from 2008. The interesting thing to me is that we seem to be no closer now, nine years later, to a meltdown than we were in 2008. All this "the-government-is-the-root-of-all-evil" nonsense gets tiring.
There is a superficial similarity, and several important differences, between a Ponzi scheme and Social Security. The superficial similarity is that benefits/investment returns are provided to existing members from the payments of new members. So as long as lots of new members join, everything is O.K., but if that flow of new members largely stops, then everything collapses.
A Ponzi scheme hides that reality and is basically a scam, whereas Social Security is completely transparent. Social Security is suffering from a reduction in the ratio of working people to retirees, but it will never completely run out of current workers.
Therefore, it will never collapse, but things will probably get tighter for some years as time goes by. Already, several steps have been taken by Congress to tweak the system in response to the changing balance between active workers and retirees:
1. The tax rates on people's income have been increased, notably but not limited to in 1984.
2. The "full retirement age" has been increased in incremental stages with plenty of notice, from 65 for our parents' generation, to 66 for most of us posting in this forum now, to 67 for "younger" people.
3. There have been other, perhaps more minor, changes, such as the elimination of the file and suspend option.
Further small tweaks as time goes by will probably be required, but "about to run dry" as in the thread title is an absurdity. That is demonstrated by the time lapse between the prediction and the present (nine years); even now, in 2017, we are not "about to run dry".
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