The problem with increasing the retirement age stuff in general is that it really screws over people who have jobs that basically wear out their bodies. Yeah, us desk types can probably work until 80 but some heavy construction guy is gonna rip himself apart long before then.
Increasing the retirement age it problematic because it also makes an existing problem worse: In certain jobs it's simply impossible to work until you're 70. Examples: coal miners, several "extreme jobs" like painting the Golden Gate bridge, diving + underwater repairs, many jobs which are physically (reaction, fitness) or psychologically demanding (teacher in a problematic / high crime rate district).
What would you do with those people? Would you punish them because they have a job which requires things a 68 year old cannot deliver?
That's why Walmart has greeters!
But seriously, the real issue that we need to prepare people in industries like that for work other than that in their later years. Obviously if someone is seriously disabled due to their career, that's a different story.
Retirement age is a damn complex topic.
Truth!
Yep, there's no good reason that people should have to be working longer to make ends meet. Talk about a giant step backwards…
There's a very good reason. It simply is not a sustainable model to have people spending almost as long in retirement as they do working, especially when you have a shrinking ratio of workers to retirees. It just doesn't work. There is only one way to make the model sustainable and that is to reduce the number of retirees to workers. There are two ways to do that:
1) Keep people in the work force for longer
2) Increase the number of people entering labor pool
We really need a combination of both to make it work. The first is easier to plan (though harder to get people to buy into since western society has somehow decided that people have a right to retire). The second is harder because it is natural for birth rates to decline in an advanced economy, so you're not going to breed all that labor domestically. Your only real choice is immigration, which is another politically touchy subject and becomes a problem when you consider that the world cannot continually have an expanding population and be sustainable.
Or we figure out how to be less wasteful.
That really doesn't have much to do with fixing the problem long term. It would delay the inevitable problems for sure, but ultimately the issue is that their simply is no way to transport labor productivity from one period to the next (and labor producitivity is what ultimately supports these benefits). You can move it into storage medium (such as bonds or gold), but those only have value if there is labor procution in the future to support it.
EDIT: Eventually the falling birthrate will have a negative effect on senior service costs, hopefully…
Yes, but by that time the entire system will have collapsed, or those systems in places like the US or Western Europe that are unsustainable, that they will have borrowed so deeply from countries without those problems, that they'll be essentially indentured servents to the lenders for the foreseeable future. Not a world I want to live in (or my kids).