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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > May > 11 > Entry
Martin Gottlieb: Fostering semi-retirement could ease Social Security problems
Washington is agonizing about retired people, most specifically about paying for their health care, but also their Social Security, at least in the long term.
Herewith some thoughts from somebody of a certain age:
This country’s institutions need to get a lot more serious about semi-retirement.
A lot of individuals are already serious about it, of course. Having left the full-time jobs of their prime, they are working part time. But that fact isn’t woven into policy.
Weaving it successfully could solve, or at least address, a lot of problems.
The big problem: People are living too long and drawing Social Security benefits too long, abetted by increasingly expensive medical care.
But suppose they might be willing to take less from Social Security.
At retirement age, a lot of people relish a break from the five-day, 40-hour grind, not because they’re tired or any less capable physically or mentally, but because they’ve been doing it an awfully long time and have other interests to pursue.
Their interest is in a slower pace and more freedom, not total indolence.
So here’s the idea: If they want to keep working part time, give them part of what they have coming from Social Security, but not all.
And tell them that if they take a partial benefit for a while, the government will increase the size of their ultimate benefit, maybe at the age of 70 or 72, or when they choose to quit working entirely.
Under current rules, employed people who are getting Social Security get a reduction in their benefits (with, of course, no promise of a bigger benefit later). But the reduction ends when they reach full retirement age, now 66 but going up to 67.
If people had the partial-benefit/higher-benefit option from 62 or 66 on, that could ease strain on the Social Security system. By working part time, they’d pay in longer. And some would never get to the point of taking the bigger benefit.
Something along similar lines might be worked out with Medicare. That would be harder, and it wouldn’t do much about the biggest expenses of Medicare, those that come at the very end of life, when most people are not employed in any way. But it could help.
What’s particularly frustrating about the prevailing clean divide between working and retirement is that it is enormously expensive for the government without even achieving something that people necessarily want.
If a lot of people don’t want full retirement, why insist on giving them full benefits?
Reasonable critiques of the government’s current approach to retirement hold that it was designed for a different century. The benefit mechanisms that worked when life was shorter don’t work anymore.
After many years when everybody talked about this but did nothing, the Republicans in the House of Representatives have done something. They passed the plan of Rep. Paul Ryan to redefine Medicare so that, instead of buying whatever health care people need, the government would give people a flat amount to buy whatever insurance they can.
Early polls have generally not been good, and some politicos are concluding that majority support simply can’t be found for any real cutback in Medicare. Certainly no bipartisan consensus is coming. At best, what the Republicans can achieve is another one of those endless, totally partisan battles. Just what the country needs, right?
One might think that current circumstances would lead some people to search hard for approaches that are not partisan in their appeal; approaches that open new options for people; options that weren’t as widely needed in the 1930s, when Social Security was enacted, or the 1960s, when Medicare was, but are right for the new century.
I know this: Just thinking about semi-retirement has caused me to write a slightly shorter column than my usual. Some people would see that as another bonus.
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