Some policymakers have called for increasing the entire retirement age of Social Security – if you can receive 100 percent of your earned benefit – as part of the long-term financial deficit solution. But workers of color earn less, have lower life expectancy and tend to work in physically demanding occupations that become more difficult to continue at older ages. For example, 50 percent of Black workers aged 55 to 62 reported in 2014 that they had jobs that “required a lot of physical effort,” compared to just 32 percent of whites.
Under the current system, filing at the earliest age, 62, you receive 75 percent of your annual full benefit; every 12 months of delay beyond your full retirement year (currently around 66, depending on your year of birth) you will receive an additional 8 percentage points until you turn 70.
Retirement ages have been steadily increasing to 67 out of 65 under changes introduced in 1983. Boston College researchers note that any further increase in full retirement ages would increase the inequality of pension wealth and have a disproportionate impact on minority households.
What’s more, the average longevity of Black Americans is shorter – in 2014, their average life expectancy of 65 years was 18.1 years, compared to 19.3 years for whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the expectation for Black men was even shorter, at 16.1 years.
“If you extend your retirement age to get the full benefit, you’re putting a cut on the people who will die younger,” says William E. Spriggs, chief economist for the AFL-CIO and a professor at Howard University. “Instead, we should increase the tax on people with higher incomes, who will live longer, and stop playing with the retirement age.”
One leading progressive organization wants to do more to tackle this problem. The group, Social Security Works, has proposed updating the current reduction in early retirement, which has not been revised since 1956.
The percentage of the full benefit that a worker could receive at age 62 would increase to 85 percent, gradually increasing to 100 percent at full retirement age.
