So here’s William Saletan’s take on how to solve the Social Security problem. I’m not going to play the “third rail” card because that’s just greedy Baby Boomer talk. I will concede he may have a point about longer life spans and the need to raise the retirement age. However, I can’t give him the whole game for two reasons:
1. William Saletan is a young punk who has no experience in the real world. Okay, I don’t know if that’s true, but it was fun to say. He’s not an easy guy to get bio info on, but I think he graduated from Swarthmore in 1987, which puts him just under 40. Frankly, when it comes to raising the retirement age I’d put more stock in the opinion if it came from somebody who is facing it in the next few years. I call this my Abortion Opinion Rule, which states that I am willing to listen the Pro-Life argument as long as it is coming only from a woman in her childbearing years.
2. He completely leaves out the matter of age discrimination. Old folks are not that welcome in the modern workplace. It’s not simply a case of our willingness to work to age 70, but more one of our attractiveness to prospective employers. The perception the under 40-set has of the AARP crowd is classic generation-gap nonsense. Most of us don’t want to hang up the cleats at 65 and settle in to a life of golf, early dinners, and bad large-print novels, and even if we did we couldn’t afford it. A lot of us would like to stop going to the god awful job we’ve had for years, but we have no problem with continuing on as productive members of society. We’d just prefer not to do it as Wal-Mart welcomers.