By Lily Vesel
Current college graduates face a predicted retirement age approximately three years younger than the average life expectancy in the United States. This October, Nerdwallet, a financial statistics website, published a report predicting the average retirement age for millennials to be 75 (compared with the current average retirement age of 62). Contributing factors include record levels of student debt upon graduation, now averaging over $35,000, as well as record high rent prices (particularly in urban areas) and expensive health care.
Most importantly, however, this prediction reflects the depleting funds in the United States’ Social Security Trust Fund. Government-distributed retirement funds in the United States are currently running severely low.
According to an annual report released earlier this year by the Social Security Board of Trustees, the trust funds used to help pay both disability and old age benefits are predicted to run out by 2034.
Why such gloomy predictions?
As a start, our current demographic situation sets the stage for a social security distribution challenge.
The Baby Boomer generation, the largest generation that this country has ever seen, is reaching retirement. This results in a greater amount of money allocated from the Social Security Trust Fund.
Basically, we have a finite level of Social Security funds and the largest percentage of retiring people who need it that this country has ever seen.
The possibility of depletion of Social Security funds points to a greater issue in the United States: the fact that, despite the incredible quantity of wealth in this country, the United States government has no way of providing a decent standard of living for its citizens.
Now, many of us are even expected to work almost our entire lives just to have enough food and shelter. Why do we have this problem? It is simple. Capitalism is just not set up to provide for the lowest members on the economic ladder.
Critics of the social welfare and social security systems in America’s capitalist society have long called for increased taxing on the rich, the redistribution of government spending and other such reforms to allow more money for social welfare systems such as the Social Security Trust Fund.
Considering we currently face a depletion of Social Security benefits on top of a retirement age of 75, these critics of the system are starting to make a whole lot of sense.
Other countries, namely social welfare systems such as Denmark or Sweden’s, successfully guarantee their citizens a feasible retirement age and decent standard of living which includes universal healthcare.
There is no acceptable explanation for why this is not possible in the United States, a country where, in 2013, the richest three percent of American families owned 54 percent of the nation’s wealth and where in 2014, the richest 400 Americans had a combined net worth of about $5.7 trillion.
In Scandinavian countries, there is a more equitable distribution of wealth. People pay higher taxes, which are then used to make sure that there is a decent minimum standard of living for all their citizens.
Those who argue against social welfare believe that the United States’ wealth inequality is justified because it is a free country where everyone has the opportunity to sell their goods and services in an open market.
They argue that Americans have the individual responsibility to provide for themselves and their families, and would argue that, if they do not want to work until they are 75, they need to either save and invest more money or spend less.
However, this argument founded on the concept of the now quite mythical “American Dream” simply does not hold in a country where, for many, “the American Dream has become a nightmare,” as presidential candidate Bernie Sanders puts it. It is a simple fact that despite living in a free market economy, American citizens do not all have access to the same opportunities and resources necessary to support a decent standard of living.
If rich Americans really paid their share and were not able to avoid paying taxes as they are now due to tax policy loopholes, there would be more money going into the social welfare system and therefore more social security funds — perhaps enough to ensure that we would not have to face “running out.”
As much as people will argue against socialist governing systems, such systems will never face a problem like a retirement age of 75, because they were built to avoid such a dilemma.
On a more positive note, with Bernie Sanders gathering votes on the Democratic side of the 2016 presidential election, America might be heading in a more socialist direction.
There is a massive and growing disparity of wealth in this country and those who will have to work until they are 75 will likely be those on the lower side of the economic scale, perpetuating this inequality.
I believe that a predicted retirement age of 75 stems from a much deeper problem plaguing America’s current governing system — the rich not paying their share and the poor not getting what they need to live a decent life.
In a country where just last year, the richest one percent of citizens owned 48 percent of America’s wealth, it is incomprehensible that any citizen in this country should have to work until age 75 to support a decent life.
To avoid facing consequences such as this one, we must begin by distributing wealth more equally in this country.
Lily Vesel, FCRH ’18, is psychology major from Florence, Massachusetts.
