 No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem. You just listened to conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro actually denounced the idea of retirements altogether. So if you are one of the working class conservative Americans who actually listens to this guy, that's what he thinks about you. He thinks that you should be forced to work until the day you die. He doesn't believe that you deserve to spend the last years of your life with your family and he wants you to get back to the office or factory to continue to pump out more value for your employer in perpetuity. That's what he thinks about you. Now it's easy for an out-of-touch multi-millionaire like him to just dismiss the idea of retirement altogether when he literally talks for a living, but this isn't a message that's going to resonate with most working class Americans, including conservatives. And that rant comes after the Republican Attorney General of Kansas attacked Biden for replacing water pipes contaminated with lead. Oh, and that came after a Republican senator blocked to bill that would have protected IVF nationally. So the Republican message as of late has been pretty clear. They don't care about you. In fact, they're barely able to contain the contempt that they have for working class Americans lately. But I do want to get to Shapiro's full remarks because he called retirement a stupid idea in the middle of a rant about how the retirement age is too low. And let's be real about this. It's insane that we haven't raised the retirement age in the United States. It's totally crazy. Joe Biden, if that were the case, Joe Biden should not be running for president. Joe Biden is 81 years old. The retirement age in the United States, at which you start to receive social security and you are eligible for Medicare, is 65. Joe Biden has technically been eligible for social security and Medicare for 16 years and he wants to continue in office until he is 86, which is 19 years past when he would be eligible for retirement. No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem. Everybody that I know who is who is elderly, who has retired is dead within five years. And if you talk to people who are elderly and they lose their purpose in life by losing their job and they stop working, things go to hell in a handbasket real quick. But put all of that aside just on a fiscal level and on a logical level. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt established 65 as the retirement age, the average life expectancy in the United States was 63 years old. Today, the average life expectancy in the United States is close to 80. It's totally insane that you believe that you should be able to work from the time that you are essentially 20 to the time that you are 65, which is a 45 year period, pay in and then you'll receive social security benefits sufficient to support you and your family, you and your wife or whatever, for like another 20 years. That's crazy talk. That is not fiscally sustainable. The notion that if you have to raise the retirement age to 67 or 68 that everyone is going to fall apart. My parents are that age. My parents are not retired and they shouldn't retire. It would be very bad for them to retire. By the way, it's disrespectful to people who are 67, 68, 69 years old to suggest that they are in the same shape as people who are 65 or in 1940. It's not true at all. Have you met a 65 year old lately? 65 year olds are not old in the United States. They're not. 68 year olds are not old in the United States. Again, Joe Biden thinks he's not old and that dude is running for president again and that dude actually is old and he's 81. I failed to see how a country in which our entire leadership class is 80 plus is telling you that we should have a retirement age of 65. It makes no sense at all. So he's in favor of raising the retirement age as a way of maintaining the solvency of Social Security. The problem is Social Security is a program that we pay into as Americans. And if we raise the retirement age, that is an overall decrease in lifetime benefits, meaning we don't get back the money that we paid into it, which is a cut to Social Security to be clear. So he is in favor of taking our own money away from us so people like him don't have to pay into the program more. And that's really what this is about, because as CBS News explains, in 2023, the Social Security tax cap stands at $160,200, which means any income above that amount is exempt from the payroll tax. As a result, middle and lower income workers bear a much greater tax burden in funding Social Security than the 6% of Americans who earn above the threshold according to a new analysis from the left-leaning center for economic and policy research. That's why the Congressional Budget Office, a federal agency that provides financial analyses of policy issues, calls the Social Security tax cap regressive, middle and low income workers pay a much greater share of their income towards the program than the rich. Eliminating or lifting the tax cap could help stabilize Social Security's trust fund by providing more revenue to the program, A December analysis by the CBO found that eliminating the cap for earnings over $250,000 would keep the trust fund solvent through 2046. And to be clear, Social Security wouldn't just be fully solvent until 2046 and then we'd have to come up with a different solution. In 2025, it would be fully solvent until 2048. And in 2026, it'd then be fully solvent until 2049 and so on and so forth. And in the worst case scenario, let's say the program isn't fully solvent at some point in the future. Well then, it would still continue to pay out benefits, albeit at a lower level. So rather than paying out 100%, maybe it'd pay out 95 or 90% of benefits. So the solution here is very straightforward. But rich people like Ben Shapiro don't want to pay more into the program to protect it because he is selfish and knows that he's never going to need to draw from Social Security in order to retire. He has accumulated so much wealth that he could retire now if he wanted to and have enough money to live multiple lifetimes on the wealth that he's accumulated. And even though he knows that him paying more into this program could help his viewers who aren't as well-office, him retire, he doesn't care. And he's telling them that they should just work until they die instead so he doesn't have to pay more in taxes. It's this boomer fuck you I got mine mentality that is literally destroying this country. And you hate to see it. But this is kind of par for the course with Ben Shapiro, who's an elitist prick. Now he also seems to be under the impression that we've never raised the retirement age and that it's still 65. But that's just not the case. Because as Matt Brunig explains, Social Security does not have one retirement age. It has 96 retirement ages, one for each month between age 62 and 70. What people call the full retirement age or FRA is just the placeholder in a formula that determines the benefit level at all 96 retirement ages. People who retire at the FRA receive 100% of the primary insurance amount, or PIA, which is a dollar figure derived from a formula applied to each individual's earnings record. People who retire before or after the FRA receive less or more than 100% of the PIA based on how far away from the FRA they are when they retire. When someone proposes increasing the retirement age to 68, all they are really saying is to cut monthly Social Security benefits from around 7% at all 96 retirement ages. A proposal to raise the retirement age to 70 is just a proposal to cut monthly benefits by around 23% at all 96 retirement ages. None of this is about when you retire. It's just a straightforward benefit reduction being expressed in an opaque way. And this graph here provided by Matt Brunig demonstrates the primary insurance amount that you'll receive depending on the age that you choose to retire. You can pause the screen if you want to take a further look at this. So when Ben Shapiro or anyone for that matter talks about raising the retirement age, they're hiding the ball. They're saying they want to cut Social Security, albeit in an indirect way. But his argument is also that life expectancy has gone up and as a result the retirement age should be adjusted to reflect that change. And the logic is that if you're living longer, well, you've got to work longer. And that makes sense if we're talking about robots, but we're not talking about more efficient hardware for computers. We're talking about human beings here. Americans are already overworked. They spend most of their days working at a job that they hate for a corporation that doesn't care about them. Americans deserve to spend more time with families and go on vacations and pursue something that they like, get a hobby. Or maybe they just want to be lazy and sit around and smoke weed. You know what? That's fine too. We have a limited amount of time on this planet and then we're gone forever. I think that it is extremely inhumane to force us to spend most of our existence doing something that we don't like just for the sake of corporate profits. We should have more free time to just live and be happy. But apparently that's controversial to someone like Ben Shapiro. But for me, I'd say that the retirement age is actually too high. And not only that, I think that the five day work week and work days are too long. But that's not to say that people don't need to work or that they won't want to. That's not what I'm saying. It is true that some people derive value from the work that they do. And perhaps they may choose to not retire. I think that that's perfectly fine. I support their choice. But let's be real. Most people hate their jobs. And I think that forcing an elderly woman to stock shelves at Walmart and deal with entitled Karen's like Ben Shapiro until the day she dies is just extremely cruel. But Ben Shapiro is perfectly fine with it so long as he can pay less taxes. How kind of him. Listen, if you are a fan of Ben Shapiro, you should know that this is the fate that he wants for you. That's what he thinks about you. He doesn't care about what you want. He wants you to work until you die. So why would you listen to somebody who thinks so little of you?