Ben Shapiro belly flops on Social Security: “Retirement itself is a stupid idea”

Shapiro claims that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, retirement is not worth it, and life in America was better before the elderly had access to a regular check

Written by Jason Campbell

Published

On the March 12 edition of The Daily Wire’s The Ben Shapiro Show, professional talker Ben Shapiro belly-flopped into the ongoing debate regarding Social Security benefits — a debate which has recently grown more intense after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump signaled his openness to cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

During his March 13 broadcast, Shapiro doubled down on his attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and the retirement age from the previous day, saying that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” which is to blame for an alleged collapse in the American family, and repeated that the very concept of retirement is bad.

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  • Shapiro attacked Social Security and Medicare over the retirement age — and under pressure then escalated his attacks

  • Shapiro attacks Social Security and the retirement age on his March 12 show

    On March 12, Shapiro asserted: “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.” [Media Matters, 3/12/24]

    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.

    Though Shapiro received some support, pundits on both the left and the right generally greeted his comments with widespread condemnation. [X, 3/12/24; X, 3/12/24; X, 3/12/24; X, 3/13/24]

  • Shapiro escalated his attacks on Social Security on March 13

    Shapiro claimed that “Social Security is a pyramid scheme.” He added: “It is a Ponzi scheme” and “we will go insolvent” unless the retirement age is raised, Social Security is privatized, or some other undefined changes to the program occur. [Media Matters, 3/13/24]

    From the March 13, 2024, edition of Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

    BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Politicians obviously have an incentive to keep kicking the can down the road and pretending that we have unlimited borrowing power and limited money to pay for a ballooning public debt. That, of course, is their incentive structure. But I'm not running for office, so I can tell you the truth, which is that if we don't raise the retirement age, or privatize Social Security over time or make any changes to Social Security, we will go insolvent. Social Security is not, in fact, a lockbox. I saw a lot of tweets yesterday from people saying, I paid into Social Security. I'm just taking out what I got in. No. You're not. You absolutely are not. The government stole your money and paid it to somebody else. And now they're stealing somebody else's money and paying it to you. And I promise you that whatever you paid in is certainly not what you're getting out. You're either getting out way less. In my case, you're getting way less in Social Security if ever you receive it than you paid in. And in many cases, you're receiving far more.

    So my grandmother, for example, receiving Social Security, got way more than she paid in. Because Social Security is not a defined — it is not a defined contributions plan, it's a defined benefits plan. And Social Security tells you how much you receive, but it has nothing to do with how much you put in.

    Social Security is a pyramid scheme. It is a Ponzi scheme. We are taking out trillions of dollars in debt to fund people retiring from work who are not somehow unable to work. That was the point that I'm making is that many of the people that we are paying not to work right now are 65 years old. Yes. They paid into the system. But that is because the system should not have taken their money in the first place. You should not have your money taken away from you by the federal government and then spent somewhere else. And then later, somebody else has to fill you in. You should be able to keep your own money. That's how you plan for retirement.

    Shapiro claimed that “the government has no actual obligation to fund your retirement” and that retirement “robs people of purpose.” [Media Matters, 3/13/24]

    From the March 13, 2024, edition of Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

    BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): There was somebody who tweeted at me yesterday about all of this. And he suggested, well, you know, I paid for my parents, and now it's my children's friend's turn to pay. Like, that's not the way that society is supposed to work. I don't want my children to pay for me. My goal is to be able to invest enough so that I can cover my children, not the other way around. And by the way, it is worth noting at this point that it will not be our children paying for us. It will be debt paying for us or immigrants paying for us as we retire.

    So then we get to the second argument, and this is the one that apparently set people off really a lot. The second argument that I make is that I think that retirement, generally, for a lot of people is stupid. Here's what I mean by that. So I don't mean that you retiring from a job that's backbreaking labor is stupid. That's your personal decision.

    The argument that I'm making is sort of twofold. One, that the government has no actual obligation to fund your retirement if it allows you to keep your money in the first place. If it stole your money, then I understand. People who had their money stolen by the government, they want their money back. I get it totally.

    Then there's the question of what retirement actually constitutes. There seems to be this idea about that retirement is natural, that you hit 65 and you go, like, sit on a beach somewhere for the next 20 years of your life. And whether that is publicly funded or privately funded, the point that I was making yesterday is that I do not think, that as a general rule, it is good for people to consider themselves retired from the world. I don't think that it's good. Retirement, particularly in the post-familial, post-church age, harms mental health. It robs people of purpose. Again, I'm not saying that you can't retire if you want to. If you have the money to do so, go for it if you want to. And I'm also not saying you should be forced not to retire if you can afford to retire. I'm making the case that, actually, early retirement, by the data, tends to harm your health, that working longer tends to be good for you. That is the argument that I'm making.

    Shapiro claimed that “as an ironic byproduct of Social Security, family has been declining.” [Media Matters, 3/13/24]

    From the March 13, 2024, edition of Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

    BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): According to the BBC, quote, research from the Institute of Economic Affairs suggests that while retirement may initially benefit health by reducing stress and creating time for other activities, adverse effects increase the longer retirement goes on. In fact, this study found that retirement increases the chances of suffering from clinical depression by around 40%, of having at least one diagnosed physical illness by about 60%. And, of course, that's not particularly surprising because for a lot of people, they find purpose in the thing that they've been doing for the past 40 years. It used to be, by the way, that you could fill that gap with a few things. Right? You retired from your job or you were forced into retirement by your company, and you'd fill that gap in a few ways.

    One would be friendships. There's only one problem. In the United States, friendship has been declining for decades. As Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, nobody even has social clubs anymore. Church, which is another place that people tended to put their time in retirement, has been declining for decades. So people don't know what to do with themselves. Family has been retiring — has been declining for decades.

    In fact, actually, as an ironic byproduct of Social Security, family has been declining. Because it used to be before Social Security, what happened to grandma when it was time for grandma to retire or grandpa? They lived with you. Grandma and grandpa lived in the house with you, and you helped your parents out. That's what it was about. And that created intergenerational contact and point of — and that was fulfilling for grandma and grandpa, and it was fulfilling for kids and grandkids because then you got the wisdom of grandma and grandpa. That's been completely destroyed by Social Security. Now the American vision is, you hit 65 or you hit 70, whatever it is, you retire, and then we shuffle you off to the Villages or some old age home or something. And listen, if you want to be there, that's that's fine. I mean, it's a free country. But the idea that this is, like, the ideal form of what 80-year-old life looks like is you don't see your kids, you don't see your grandkids, and you live in a home by yourself, that that the data do not support the idea that this is wonderful for people. And it is worth noting that when this sort of idea was proposed, elderly people actually revolted against it. They didn't like it.

     

    Shapiro stated that “human beings are really not made to, quote, unquote, retire in the way that we think of it,” adding, “As long you still have your health and as long as you still have your mental aptitude, it seems to me like most people want to work and should.” [Media Matters, 3/13/24]

    From the March 13, 2024, edition of Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

    BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): One of the fascinating things that some of the people who are sort of on the right on this, typically would be considered right wing of the political spectrum who were very upset with me yesterday.

    They were saying, well, you don't respect the blue-collar worker because you're saying that people, quote, unquote, don't deserve to retire. My point is that I don't think that retirement is a good personal decision. I don't think there's a deserve about it. You deserve whatever you can pay for. As far as what you deserve from the public, from the guy who's still working, that's a completely different story.

    But it is interesting to me that many of the same people who will, for example, object to automated technologies because they say that it kills jobs and people need jobs. The universal basic income won't do it. You can't just cut somebody a welfare check and find a sense of fulfillment in that, Suddenly believe that the logic reverses itself when you hit 65. When you hit 65, they can cut you a welfare check-in the form of Social Security. And that somehow this is more fulfilling than when you were 30 and they were cutting you a welfare check in lieu of a job. You can't have it both ways. You can't have jobs are good and also jobs are bad. Like, you you you gotta pick one.

    And my general perception is that human beings like to work in one form or another. And that human beings are really not made to, quote, unquote, retire in the way that we think of it, like sitting on a pool deck somewhere for 20 years. That's not what human beings are created for. From a Biblical perspective, you might say, thou shalt work 6 days a week, and on 7th, thou shalt rest. You might you might say that. As long as you still have your health and as long as you still have your mental aptitude, it seems to me like most people want to work and should. And that doesn't mean the government forces them to. We're not talking about sending you to the salt mines when you're 70 years old.

    But I'm just bewildered by this perception that that's somehow an elitist sentiment when the point that I'm making is that I believe it is human nature for people to want to feel productive, useful, and purposeful. And if you can't find that production and purpose anywhere else than a job, which seems to be the way that it works in America these days, because, again, church and family have disappeared, then you're gonna have a bigger problem than you think when you, quote, unquote, retire.

  • Shapiro’s attacks are not just wildly unpopular — they’re also misleading about the retirement age

  • Shapiro's claims about lifespan are missing context

    Shapiro said the average lifespan of Americans has expanded from when Social Security was established. He wrote, “If you are mentally and physically healthy, taxpayers should not pay you to retire at 65. When Social Security was created, life expectancy was 64. Today, it's 78.” [X, 3/12/24]

    As the Social Security website lays out, much of the change in Americans’ lifespans is due to a dramatic decrease in infant mortality. [Social Security Administration, accessed 3/13/24]

    Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood. As Table 1 shows, the majority of Americans who made it to adulthood could expect to live to 65, and those who did live to 65 could look forward to collecting benefits for many years into the future. So we can observe that for men, for example, almost 54% of the them could expect to live to age 65 if they survived to age 21, and men who attained age 65 could expect to collect Social Security benefits for almost 13 years (and the numbers are even higher for women). Also, it should be noted that there were already 7.8 million Americans age 65 or older in 1935 (cf. Table 2), so there was a large and growing population of people who could receive Social Security. Indeed, the actuarial estimates used by the Committee on Economic Security (CES) in designing the Social Security program projected that there would be 8.3 million Americans age 65 or older by 1940 (when monthly benefits started). So Social Security was not designed in such a way that few people would collect the benefits.