Don’t higher age cut-offs cause most or all of the problems associated with means-testing? Why are you for the former, yet ambivalent on the latter?
Feb 18 2010
These are posts that I recommend, without providing excerpts. Robin Hanson offers an illustration of the theory that prestige-status is less threatening to people than dominance-status. So do people perceive the wealth of Bill Gates as conferring prestige-status (not so threatening) or dominance-status (very threaten...
Feb 17 2010
Greg Mankiw writes, let's suppose that you are a conservative and you want the fiscal commission to succeed. You will have to agree to higher taxes as part of the bargain. But what should you aim to get in return? He would ask for an increase in the age of eligibility for both Social Security and Medicare. He woul...
Feb 17 2010
Don't higher age cut-offs cause most or all of the problems associated with means-testing? Why are you for the former, yet ambivalent on the latter?
READER COMMENTS
Philo
Feb 17 2010 at 2:33pm
I don’t get it. David’s “problems” with means-testing are: high marginal tax rates through “phase out,” obscurity of the concept of “means,” and unfairness. I don’t see that any of these apply to bumping up age cut-offs. (Maybe unfairness, but that’s a slippery concept at best. It is usually judged synchronically–it isn’t usually considered unfair that we are richer and longer-lived than our ancestors–so it wouldn’t be considered unfair that 65-year-olds used to be eligible for Medicare but now they aren’t.)
david
Feb 17 2010 at 2:47pm
Likewise with Philo. How might a higher cutoff cause higher marginal tax rates? Do I get to accelerate my aging process by sheer force of will?
Jim Glass
Feb 17 2010 at 2:54pm
Higher age cut-offs for Medicare and the like are a regressive benefit cut, across the board.
That is, who do they hurt most? The people most in need, who will most rely on govt assistance. They suffer a lot more, take a much larger hit as a percentage of real income, than the boomers who are going to use their entitlements to subsidize the cost of sailing off on their yachts.
Means testing, to the contrary, takes benefits only out of the pockets of the latter.
That’s why although a delayed benefit age seems reasonable, fair and good in theory from a distance, it ain’t so easy to get past the progressive champions of Medicare et al in practice.
Of course, they don’t like means testing either, but the day will come…
John Thacker
Feb 17 2010 at 3:05pm
The people most most in need get other government assistance, like Medicaid.
Ella
Feb 17 2010 at 4:14pm
Isn’t the idea of SoSec that it is available for a retirement fund? As in … for non-workers? People are living longer and healthier. So, um, maybe they could work until 70. (As has been pointed out, I’m sure, SoSec originally kicked in, like, 2 years after the average age of death. That’s the equivalent of 86 nowadays.) An age requirement doesn’t hurt anyone who works because they wouldn’t receive benefits anyway, no matter how needy. Means testing does take something away from people who (ignorantly, but whatever) paid into the system expecting a return.
Also, means testing basically admits that SoSec is nothing but a generational welfare system, which is unpopular. So there’s that.
I don’t care. It’ll go bust before my dad retires, anyway.
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