Washington Post Continues to Lie About Social Security and Life Expectancy

In their decades-long quest to gut welfare for the poor, the Post tells blatant falsehoods about how long the poor live after “retirement.”

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The Washington Post, both in its editorial output and reporting, keeps casually telling lies about social security and the retirement age. Let’s take a look at those lies and why they matter.

In a March 2023 editorial on “social security reform,” the Washington Post editorial board wrote the following passage:

A plausible plan would involve these elements: broadening the base upon which the 12.4 percent payroll tax is levied — currently 84 percent of all earnings — to the 90 percent that prevailed in 1982, at the time of the Reagan reforms; gradually indexing up the age, currently 67, at which people may retire at full benefits, to take account of longer retirements due to rising life expectancy

As Conor Smyth at People’s Policy Project makes clear, this was the nominal reason, but not an actual thing that happened. Indeed, since the full retirement age increased to 67 in 2000, life expectancy across the board has decreased by 0.4 years:

Over the same period during which the 1983 law forced the retirement age up from 65 to 67, life expectancy in the US actually declined. In 2000, US life expectancy was 76.8 years. According to data released last December, life expectancy in 2021 was 76.4 years. This was the second consecutive year of significant life expectancy decline. 

It is simply not true to suggest, as the Post does, that Americans enjoyed “longer retirements due to rising life expectancy” since 2000, because overall life expectancy since 2000 has declined by 0.4 years. 

As Smyth also notes, "raising the retirement age" “is a misnomer, because what is being proposed is not changing the age at which you can retire; instead, you would be able to retire over the same range of ages, only with a lower benefits at each age (Extra!, 12/12). This is more accurately described as 'cutting benefits.'” (Smyth’s own take down of The Washington Post’s social security lies and distortions from June is worth reading in its entirety at FAIR.)

The second, more popular lie The Post tosses around can be seen here from Drew Goins summing up the Post editorial board’s findings:  

“What the [Washington Post editorial] board proposes is a broadening of the amount of income the Social Security tax is levied on; a gradual increase of the full retirement age to keep up with rising life expectancy ;

The Post repeats this lie of omission, or some variation of it, in its nominally straight reporting all the time. Here’s one such example from March of this year from “business and technology” writer Jacob Bogage:

“life expectancy increased from 61 years in 1935, when Social Security was enacted, to 70 years in 1965, to 77 in 2020, according to the World Bank and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means people are spending more time retiring, and they’re spending more money on health care.”

It was conventional wisdom, and still is, that overall life expectancy (already a very flawed metric, but more on that later) would simply grow in perpetuity. And much of our “social security reform” sophistry over the years has been built around this assumption—an assumption that has turned out to be entirely wrong. Writing in 1999, the Director of the National Institute on Aging at the National Institute of Health, Richard J. Hodes (who still holds the position) said the “the most commonly cited life expectancy by 2020 is 85 years. But a growing number of experts believe it will exceed 100.” In 2021, the last year official CDC data is available, life expectancy was 76.4 years. 

Rather than taking in to account this new grim reality of declining left expectancy, brought about by a combination of COVID-19, drug overdoses, and accidental injury, according to researchers at Harvard, Post reporters and editors have decided to simply ignore it altogether because it gets in the way of The Narrative that hordes of healthy, happy 68 year olds are sitting around living high on the hog of free government cheese rather than contributing to “the workforce”.

Moreover the idea, casually advanced by Bogage, that overall life expectancy increases mean “people” are spending more time retired isn’t true; one does not simply follow from the other. (Also, notice how the reporter skips 2021 data, which was available when the piece was written in March, which shows life expectancy as 76.4). As Century Foundation economist Laura Haltzel makes clear in her March 2023 column in Barrons, overall “life expectancy” numbers are useless to the point of being a non sequitur. What matters is quality life expectancy after retirement and, more to the point, quality life expectancy after retirement for the poor, for whom the program is meant to lift out of poverty. As Haltzel writes:

The argument has been that if people are living longer, they should be working longer. That sounds reasonable on its face, until you remember your middle school algebra and recognize that averages can be easily skewed. The fact is that the increases in longevity have not been shared equally in the population. The highest-income individuals in our society have experienced longevity gains, while the longevity of the middle and lower earners has remained stagnant or even declined. For example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine estimates that for women born from 1930 to 1960, life expectancy for those at the bottom of the earnings distribution has declined by four years, while for those at the top of the earnings distribution, it has increased by five years.

For women born between 1930 and 1960, life expectancy for bottom earners has declined four years. 

This is to say nothing about the racial gap in “retirement age” brought about by decades of discrimination, redlining, mass incarceration, and environmental racism. According to a 2015 Global Policy Solutions report, even using the more rosy pre-Covid numbers, “raising the retirement age to 69 would cut Social Security benefits by about 14 percent per month ” for African Americans. According to even the conservative Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “In 2019, white population life expectancy at age 65 was 19.5 years, while life expectancy for both the Black and American Indian or Alaska Native populations at age 65 was 18.2. ” 

Other research by Richard V. Reeves, Sarah Nzau, Ember Smith have found that when one focuses on black men, the life expectancy picture from birth gets much grimmer—at 72.2, which, using the Post’s recommendations and criteria, would give them a nice, relaxing retirement of 25 months. Recent research on “pension reforms” in Europe that sought to raise the retirement age also shows that increasing the retirement age, which The Post (owned by Jeff Bezos, net worth $154.3 billion) argues we do, “has a negative effect on health outcomes as the prevalence of several diagnoses ” such as “mental health, musculoskeletal diseases, and obesity, increases”. 

Does the Post editorial board and its reporters account for this? Do they mention these awkward and complicating facts? Do they discuss how overall life expectancy, which includes many wealthy people who don’t need and will never use social security, wildly distorts their go-to cliche that “life expectancy is rising”? Do they even acknowledge that life expectancy has declined over the past two years on record? No, they don’t, because it messes up the cartoon narrative they’ve been pushing for decades: that the elderly poor are simply living much longer, at the same rates of health, and thus need to work well into their 70s.