Resolved: The US should raise the Social Security age of eligibility

If you just got fired from your job for being grossly incompetent, that does not prove you have a disability. It certainly does not meant the US Social Security Administration's definition of one [1]. After all, it's not impossible for old people to keep working, it's just harder for them to do so, and thus more mistakes are to be expected. Besides, the main reason they won't get hired is because they're old and thus won't be able to stick around for a long time. Pro admits his model isn't what's best for the old people, so the only voting issue in this debate is the question of who should have to bear the load - the old folks, or younger people. A compassionate society is more costly to run than an individualist dispassionate one in terms of money, but in terms of quality of life, both for the givers and the receivers, showing some compassion to the elderly is absolutely superior. Incentive to retireBefore I begin, please note I use "pension", "social security" and "retirement benefit" interchangably. I didn't know these meant different things in the US so I thought I should clarify. The reduced benefit receivers still require a significant amount of saving, which lower-income people just can't achieve. They subsidise mostly the upper middle class to move into retirement, not the poor who are most likely to be in desperate need of money. Disability insurance isn't even analogus. Being old has never been a reason to give disability insurance by itself, but it sure has been a reason to not hire somebody, especially when younger workers need jobs. So it turns out we still need to create incentives to retire. Raising the retirement age forces people to keep working for longer. The reason that incentive is perverse is because the older you become, the more punishing, the more cruel, and the more badly usual work tasks become. Pro wanted to see proof of this. Here's a pretty picture courtesy of New Scientist from one of the biggest studies on age vs productivity: As you can see, once you get over the age of about 30, your abilities generally begin to decline. Similar trends have been repeatedly observed in countless studies. That's not because the majority are disabled - it's because aging is normal. Even if they are very experienced, like I mentioned last round, many of these professions we're talking about really have no room for error. We shouldn't employ 70-year-olds if we wouldn't trust 10-year-olds. I might add that child labour would increase the size of the labor pool much more efficiently to pay for the older generation, and it would be no more morally abhorrent than what pro is proposing. Retirement is CompensationIt's frankly insulting to a person who has spent their entire life working for something, to tell them that their age is a disability. I think old age would be more rightly classified as a transition than an impairment - it might not allow people to work as they used to, but it also brings a great deal of reflectiveness and wisdom. Pro is advocating state-sponsored ageism. If the state does not qualify the people as disabled then they are left without care, if they do qualify them as disabled then they legitimize the stigma that exists against hiring older workers. Either way, it's not a fair deal for those whom our society most needs to protect - our most vulnerable. Retirement may not have been thought of as a reward for a generation by the legislators who introduced it to America, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't serve that purpose. A law can have an unexpected advantage, and that's a reason to protect the law. Pro does not rebut the claim that the older people are among society's most vulnerable, nor the causal link that they are therefore worth protecting. Pro also does not rebut the extension to this, that older people are less likely to receive support from society in other ways in relation to the respect they deserve. These are each true quite independant of what these facts mean for younger people, which I deal with in my cost rebuttal. But in terms of earning this compensation, there can be little doubt that old people have done so. Having old people hog all the jobs hardly makes things easier for their posterity when young people are still occasionally making records for their levels of unemployment. Working on doesn't give young people more money, but old people more money, as I showed last round. The problem is that young people really need jobs. ArbritraryMy opponent doesn't really continue to claim that 65 is a totally random arbritrary figure. It might be a bad figure for America and it's future, but that does not mean it is arbritrary. Here's what's arbritrary - using life expectancy rather than working years expectancy to justify a retirement age. There is simply no connection between the age at which it is best for a person to retire and the age at which they are likely to die. How to pay for itWhen a smaller generation retires, there aren't so many expenses, and thus a portion of earned money that otherwise would have been expended could be used to hedge against higher-need generations that may come. When a larger generation retires, they create expenses. It's no secret governments often create irresponsible debts, but this is not one of them. It's a debt with an inbuilt mechanism for paying it back. It's worth noting that pro's solution of moving them on to the disability benefit is no better, in that the money still reaches their pockets at the expense of the taxpayer. The fertility rate has long finished decreasing and has instead been steady since about 1970 [2]. Hopefully that means another disaster like this can be averted in future. Nor is it getting worse. When our generation grows up, we will solve that problem our great-grandparents made, without even needing to do anything. The alternative is to pay it off now, off the backs of toiling old people. It's also the case that things become more affordable when a large older population dies because they leave behind estates. These are taxed. I would not dispute that it would be easily possible to waste that oppertunity and spend it on some more short term project, but that's why you need financial prudence. It won't "end up creating massive debt" - it won't "end up" at all for one thing, and any debt it creates is manageable by nature. It's like taking on debt to start a company you can prove will make money. If the company isn't absolutely disasterously managed, there isn't a problem. I do agree the figures are scary. About 2 workers per beneficiary sounds plausible for a period. But it isn't forever, and it isn't that bad. My country is currently on 1.5 workers per beneficiary [3] and our budget is looking a lot more positive than yours in any decent economic opinion. We're not even suffering that much hardship, and our debt overall is actually decreasing. I know America is in a bit of a tough time right now, but please don't let that distract you from what is both financially sensible and true to the value of compassion that is so important to protect. Con is yet to justify why, exactly, 2 workers per beneficiary is "financially impossible to uphold". ConclusionPro said I misrepresented my figures. It's true, the real life expectancy has gone up by about 5 years. But that's a short time considering that they were already paying for an average of 15 years for seniors in the 30s, and that was during the time of the Great Depression. What's scary is the thought that elderly people should be forced to work to save the young people a few cents on their taxes. I'm proud to oppose that notion. The resolution is negated. Sources1 - . http://www.ssa.gov...2 - . https://www.google.co.nz...3 - . http://www.interest.co.nz...