Donald Trump wasn’t on stage at the GOP debate on Wednesday, though he seemed to occupy Ron DeSantis’s mind. That would explain the Florida Governor’s punt on reforming entitlements that ruled out even gradually raising the Social Security retirement age.
The former President this spring lambasted Mr. DeSantis for supporting Paul Ryan’s entitlement reforms while in Congress. “DeSantis is colluding with his globalist handlers to go full Never Trump in order to gaslight the people into thinking that Medicare and Social Security should be ripped away from hard-working Americans,” the Trump campaign declared.
Two decades ago Mr. Trump supported raising the retirement age to 70 and creating private retirement accounts. But he now rejects even modest changes to Social Security. When the subject of entitlement reform came up during the debate, most candidates bobbed and weaved like Muhammad Ali.
Vivek Ramaswamy said the solution to America’s entitlement problems is “sacrificing foreign wars.” Sorry, abandoning national defense won’t save Social Security. In the past two years alone, Social Security benefits have increased by $219 billion—about the size of the Navy’s budget last year.
THE TRUTH TELLERS on stage, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, argued for gradually raising the retirement age for younger Americans to slow the growth in Social Security spending, which this past fiscal year added up to $1.3 trillion. Mr. DeSantis dismissed the idea, saying “when life expectancy is declining, I don’t see how you could raise it the other direction.”
Life expectancy did decline in 2021 to 76.4 years from 78.8 in 2019, but the drop owed almost entirely to Covid and drug overdoses. The latter have been increasing among young people for more than two decades, but that has no bearing on how long seniors can expect to live and in what condition.
Covid’s impact on deaths was a blip like the 1918 Spanish influenza, which caused life expectancy to fall by more than 10 years. So-called excess deaths this year have returned to pre-pandemic trends, and therefore life expectancy for seniors should too. At age 65, Americans could expect to live 19.6 more years in 2019, up from 16.4 in 1980.
Yet the Social Security retirement age has increased by only two years since the early 1980s when Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill cut a deal with Ronald Reagan to shore up the program. The compromise gradually raised the retirement age for future generations to 67 from 65 and increased payroll taxes.
Life expectancy was 61.7 years in 1935 when Social Security was established. If the retirement age had increased in line with life expectancy, it would now be about 80 years. No candidate is proposing to raise the retirement age to 80, but Ms. Haley was right to say it should better reflect increasing life expectancy.
Like Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security will have to be reformed eventually because its current course is unsustainable. But denialism by GOP candidates will make it that much harder to sell modest benefit adjustments to voters, giving Democrats more leverage to demand bigger tax increases. Is that what Messrs. DeSantis and Trump want?
