May 10, 2023 01:41 PM UTC

Buck's Debt-Ceiling Solution: Work Until You Die

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado’s arch-conservative but occasionally unpredictable Rep. Ken Buck was one of only four Republicans to vote against GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s sweeping spending cut proposal in exchange for what should be a routine hike in the nation’s debt limit–a proposal itself considered dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate, failing to resolve the impasse as a potentially disastrous default on the nation’s debts looms.

This week, Rep. Buck appeared on local news channel FOX 31 to talk about the debt limit negotiations, and answer the hard question: if McCarthy’s proposed cuts weren’t enough to win Buck’s support, what would be?

Especially if you’re under 30, you might not want to know the answer:

Buck said it’s important the country continues to fund border protections, national defense and social security and Medicare for people currently on those programs. But he also suggested raising the retirement age, saying, “We absolutely need to look at saving those programs and reforming those programs for folks that are under 30 years old.”

The congressman highlighted rising life expectancy nationwide, adding that the retirement age could differ depending on jobs.

“For some folks who have had mostly white-collar jobs during their lifetime and are healthy, the retirement age may very well go up to 70, 71, 72 years old. [Pols emphasis] For those folks who are working in construction, working in other areas, where their body tends to break down, we need to make sure we have a lower retirement age,” Buck said.

Let’s be clear: if Rep. Ken Buck had his way, the retirement age for most American workers would become the highest in the world.

To put this in perspective, most industrialized nations have a retirement age ranging from only 60 in China to 62-67 in most of Europe–notably excepting France, of course, where centrist President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64 was met with nationwide protests. To be clear, despite the perennial handwringing over the supposedly imminent “bankruptcy” of the nation’s social safety nets, relatively modest changes like removing the income cap from Social Security and increasing the high-income Medicare tax could fix the system’s “solvency problem” with far less pain. But those are solutions Republicans are ideologically prevented from even considering.

It’s almost always a question that Republicans don’t want to directly answer with the painful specifics, so Buck gets credit for honesty if nothing else. But in reality, Americans would readily choose any number of fixes for Social Security and Medicare before being forced to stay on the job until age 72. That’s one of the reasons you almost never hear specific proposals like Buck’s near elections or from Republican candidates considered in any way vulnerable.

If making Americans work until 72 is what Republicans want, take it to the polls.

The smart ones know how that will end, and that’s why they won’t.