Putting a Stake Through the Retirement Age Zombie

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A few days ago I wrote about the perennial popularity of raising the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare. It’s a bad idea that doesn’t save very much money, is savagely unfair to the poor, and in the case of Medicare, does nothing to rein in cost growth, which is our biggest problem. But it’s an easy sound bite, so it sticks around forever even though there are loads of better ways of addressing entitlement spending.

Here’s a nice little chart from CBPP (based on data from the Kaiser Family Foundation) that illustrates this for Medicare. Here’s what it shows:

  • If the Medicare eligibility age were raised to 67, it would produce net savings of $5.7 billion. That’s a whopping 1% of total Medicare spending. The reason the number is so low is that a lot of 65-66 year-olds would end up on Medicaid or in Obamacare’s subsidized healthcare exchanges. The feds pay either way.
  • But wait! Although the federal government would save a bit of money, employers would end up spending $4.5 billion more and seniors themselves would spend $3.7 billion more.
  • In the end, the federal government would end up with only tiny savings, and those savings would be more than made up by higher spending elsewhere. The net effect on the healthcare system as a whole would be an increase of $5.7 billion, not a decrease.

This is just a bad, bad, zombie idea. It might be worth arguing over the methodology here if the numbers were big enough to matter, but they aren’t. Even in the best case, raising the Medicare eligibility age would have an insignificant effect on the federal budget.

The more time we spend on this, the less time we’re spending on ideas that might actually accomplish something. It’s time to move on.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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