Ben Shapiro: “No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old”
Shapiro: “Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem”
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From the March 12, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): 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. OK? 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 gonna 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 -- were 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 fail 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.