Honestly, I don't think its such a bad idea. Life expectancy in 1935 was 62. Today its 79. So if we want the program to be solvent, we have to adopt one or more of the following solutions: keep increasing the SS-eligibility age in tandem with life expectancy, increase the FICA tax, cut benefits

Dependency ratios (the number of workers compared to the number of people dependent on workers) may actually be lower than they were in the 60s simply because fewer people are having children.

Even if that weren't true, the idea that we have to keep putting the age up is predicated upon productivity remaining static.

Productivity has gone up consistently and will likely continue to go up.

Curiously some people are breathlessly optimistic about automation when it's a convenient scapegoat for high unemployment but immediately lose all faith in it when it comes to social security projections. These people probably don't have our best interests at heart.

You left out adding more people into the system, although that's usually considered in the context of demography rather than mortality. One accounting reason to consider it from this perspective, though, is that adult immigrants have typically been raised and educated at some other country's expense so their productive entry to the US workforce is free of any debt overhang, ie no public monies were spent by the US on educating so they're basically coming to help out with the national debt for free. Of course the flip side of this is a brain drain for countries that see too many people leave.

I mean, the FICA taxes were increased in 1983 in part as preparation for the Boomer's retirement. When that bubble is past us, we shouldn't need to increase again for a couple generations, even accounting for increased average lifespan.

Grandfathering would be unjust though.

You could also choose what the U.S. is choosing now, which is to reduce U.S. life expectancy.

> It's exactly the kind of "we got ours" BS that the boomers are so known for.

The boomers are just recipients of an anomalous post-war economic order that heavily benefitted the US for a couple decades.

The average 60-year old had no role in pulling the rug out from millennials.

Right. The average Boomer had nothing to do with it. To be fair, the Boomer politicians and business managers didn't screw the Millennials, either. Not directly. They pulled the rug out from the Gen-Xers, and let the domino effect take out the Millennials, too. Yeah, as a generation, we still exist, even though nobody talks about us.

The Boomers were the beneficiaries of post-war prosperity, but they also decided to steal money from the future to finance their generational party/gravy train. The Greatests gave them a gift of some free money, but then they also decided to smash open their own childrens' and grandchildrens' piggy banks and fill them full of promissory notes. Except they aren't IOUs that are promises from the parents to pay their kids back. They are UOMEs that obligate the kids to pay their parents more money, if they ever actually get some.

I'm biased by anecdote, because I'm old enough to have seen typical (late) Boomer lifestyles and compare them to typical Gen X lifestyles in the same age range. In other words, I'm old enough now to compare my own life with that of my parents when they were the age I am now.

> The Boomers were the beneficiaries of post-war prosperity, but they also decided to steal money from the future to finance their generational party/gravy train.

I hear this a lot, but what exactly do you mean?

The real reason we don't have the same great lifestyles our (let's be honest - mostly white, male) parents and grandparents did is because no one can get a good paying factory job right out of high school anymore - an inevitable, global, structural change that no one could've prevented.

I don't know about your family, but 50% of my ancestors were female.

What I mean is that as Boomers took control of government and business from the previous generation, they overwhelmingly preferred current consumption over future growth. They preferred to benefit their own generation rather than attempt to improve the lot of future generations. And in many cases, they took on a lot of public debt, spent it for private benefit, and mailed the bill ahead to the year 2030. Then they forgot to build the businesses, infrastructure, and capital investments that are absolutely required to be able to pay not just the interest, but the principal, too.

So now we get events like interstate highway bridges collapsing into the Mississippi River. But we can't have that, so instead how about we sell an interstate highway bridge to a private company and let them collect tolls on it? Then maintenance is their problem, right? Oh, and hey, we're driving cities into bankruptcy with the benefits we voted to ourselves, so let's make sure that rather than avoid the bankruptcy by stepping back some of our own foolish economic choices, we instead focus our efforts on making sure they can't discharge those future obligations when the bankruptcy happens. And when retirement benefits finally exceed the productive capacity of all the working people in the nation, the Boomers will mostly be dead already, and the Gen-Xers will be the ones stuck scavenging meals from the garbage while dodging the roving bands of Gen-Z cannibal marauders in their spiky, Mad-Max-style wasteland buggies.

It's all just exactly what can go wrong when you have too much democratic leverage in your republic. The Boomers had just enough of a numeric advantage over other generational voting blocs that they got a disproportionately large share of representation. Then they just voted themselves all the cookies out of the cookie jar.

I'd point to the massive amounts of privatization of what was public infrastructure.

If you're into documentaries, I'd really recommend some of Adam Curtis's stuff on the topic; he covers the topics much more completely and eloquently than I.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...

It's also because they consistently cut taxes and public investment in infrastructure while passing legislation to inflate the costs of basic life necessities such as housing.

No - that's an important structural reason, but I dispute your claim that it's the overarching economic factor or that it's entirely out of our control.

You're right, but the many boomers have been happy to accept the benefit even while seeing the cost fall on succeeding generations, though it's hard to blame individual people from drifting along with their cohort.

This is already the case, since 1983. Also note that there's a huge difference in the payout depending on whether you go for early or full benefit age. https://www.nasi.org/learn/socialsecurity/retirement-age