Jeb Bush promoted raising Social Security’s retirement age on Fox News. But nobody pointed out that such a policy disproportionately hurts the poor.
Fox host Neil Cavuto was in Orlando yesterday for Florida Governor Rick Scott’s economic growth summit. Bush got a chummy 13-minute interview, compared to 3:37 for Rick Perry and 3:24 for Bobby Jindal.
During the interview, Cavuto asked about Social Security.
BUSH: It’s less broke, I guess, than Medicaid and Medicare which will explode into our lives and create huge structural deficits. Social Security, I think, we need to adjust it because life expectancy has gone up.
…If we’re going to fix it for the next 50 years, we need to start working on it now, and progressively raise the retirement age. For people that are near retirement or already in retirement, I don’t believe there should be.
Bush said he doesn’t have “a specific plan yet” because he’s not a candidate. But he also said not much will dissuade him from running.
But in an excellent article in Vox, Ezra Klein explains how raising the retirement age is a popular fix for Social Security with the Washington elites who work at easier, better jobs and live longer. They present it as a common-sense solution. But for the working class who die younger, work at more taxing jobs that they tend to dislike, not so much. Klein characterizes “the eagerness of political elites to raise the retirement age” as “an expression of the vast chasm of class privilege that separates political Washington from the rest of the country.”
Not surprisingly, neither Cavuto nor Bush mentioned the ill effects of such a proposal on the less fortunate.
Watch it below, from yesterday’s Your World.