The Head of Goldman Sachs Wants to Raise Your Retirement Age

From The Atlantic

Lloyd Blankfein, the 57-year-old CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was paid more than $16 million dollars last year, appeared on CBS last night to talk about the Fiscal Cliff and lay some truth on the American people: You all need to work longer. 

As Ezra Klein and others before me have noted, it is very easy for people like Blankfein who are paid outrageous sums of money to sit in offices, think, and talk to tell Americans they should delay retirement. After all, they probably aren't pining for for the day they get to stop working. Same goes for senators who would prefer to croak while prattling on during a floor speech and for national journalists who intend to keep writing until they finally go blind from staring at a monitor. They like their jobs. They don't want to leave them.

However, it might not be so easy for your average American, particularly one with a numbingly repetitive or physically taxing occupation, to work those extra years.

It turns out that raising the retirement age is also one of the more regressive ways to cut benefits. That's because the more Americans make, the longer they live. The less they make, the shorter they live. Over the past thirty years, almost all of the gains in life expectancy among men at age 65 have gone to the top half of earners. (as shown in this graph courtesy of the incidental economist).