President Joe Biden got Republicans to agree that they would "stand up for seniors" during the State of the Union Address on Tuesday. After saying that Republicans wanted to gut the program along with Medicare, some GOP members feigned shock that anyone would link them to all of the previous efforts attempting to kill the programs started by Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal."
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was heralded as an epic actor for his performance during the big speech because he was so aghast. A 2010 video of Lee showed him promising donors to his campaign that his only purpose as a Senator was to eliminate Medicare and Medicaid.
“That’s why I’m doing this, to get rid of that. Medicare and Medicaid are the same sort and need to be pulled up," said Lee in the video. To explain away the video, he claimed that really he was just talking about changing the programs because they have been "raided" so many times by "Washington."
The Social Security Administration calls such raids a myth.
Both Social Security and Medicare have shortfalls forecasted for the distant future. One Republican proposal suggests increasing the retirement age, again. Already it has been increased from 65 to 67 for anyone born after 1960.
CNBC spoke with several experts about the GOP idea to increase the age to 70 for anyone born after 1978. The other proposal would mandate that the Medicare eligibility age match the Social Security retirement age and index it to life expectancy.
“Social Security is a very simple problem: It’s money coming in and money going out in benefits,” CNBC cited Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
“There’s two ways to fix it: You can have less money go out or more money come in,” she explained.
She noted that increasing the retirement age is a benefit cut.
The first time the retirement age was raised was a huge mistake, said Prof. Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist at The New School.
“That experiment was a big failure. And that hope was misplaced. They are proposing a 40-year-old plan that doesn’t work for this economy,” Ghilarducci said.
When the conversation over this first began in 1983, there was an expectation that people would live longer and be healthier in the future. That hasn't been the case for the United States, however. And while college-educated, white workers that are doing less physically demanding jobs could probably work until they're 70, that's certainly not the case for a huge subset of American workers that do physically demanding jobs.
“Lower-education groups and racial minorities just do not have that many healthy years of life expectancy that they could do it,” Munnell said. “So it’s really discriminatory.”
She argued that 67 is probably the highest that it could go at this point.
