A segment of DU is very invested in painting a dystopian picture of the US

[joshcryer]

235. The myth of early retirement

The decline in work among men in their 40s and 50s raises concerns about a lack of jobs for less-educated older male workers, but this is a separate issue from Social Security. A focus on the average retirement age and labor force participation at the end of people’s working lives often lends support to policies that would extend working lives into old age, when it might be wiser to focus on increasing labor force participation at younger ages. Even though work effort for the population overall has increased, there is still room for improvement. For example, disability rates have increased due to many factors, including the impact of a weak job market on workers in poor health and the decline in health insurance coverage. Raising the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages would exacerbate this trend, but expansionary macroeconomic policies and other job-creation measures would alleviate it. Such policies would also help middle-aged men without college degrees, teenagers, and others who are more likely to drop out of the workforce when jobs are scarce.

The focus on the average retirement age is a distraction from the more important question of how much Americans work over the course of their entire working lives. The broader question of whether Social Security’s projected shortfall is due to a growing imbalance between work and leisure is addressed at greater length in a longer EPI briefing paper (Morrissey 2011). However, as long as people pay attention to these statistics and draw policy prescriptions from them, they should be as accurate as possible.

http://www.epi.org/publication/myth-early-retirement/

Claiming Social Security at age 66 has recently surged in popularity, due to the increase in the full retirement age to 66 for everyone born between 1943 and 1954. Some 19 percent of men and 13 percent of women born in 1943 and 1944 signed up at age 66, compared to about 1 percent among earlier groups of retirees. "It's striking how many people sign up in the month at which they reach the full retirement age," Johnson says. "The fact that the government has said that 66 and 0 months is the retirement age really seems to resonate with people. The government, just by how they frame the issue, can really induce people's retirement ages."

http://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/articles/2013/09/09/the-most-popular-ages-to-claim-social-security