Mollie Drexler and Stephanie Podhradsky

Our article is about how people are going to soon have to deal with retiring later and an universal pension age. The age will soon be going to 67 instead of 65. Rich people are living longer and don’t have to work so much and this is going to cause lower income people to have to work longer. People in a higher class have an age gap of 5 more years than people in lower classes. This will be causing most people to not be able to enjoy their retirement for as long. Some reasons people believe that rich people live longer is because less stress, less bad habits, and better health care. People that have money are working less time and this causes less stress. Along with that, they don’t have to the stressful jobs that run down the body. They normally work inside and within companies. Poorer people are forced to find jobs such as working in mines and in dirtier places. This definitely has more of an effect on their health. Bad habits such as smoking a lot, drinking a lot, and not eating well are other causes for an earlier mortality rate in the poor people. After a stressful or long day it is easy to want to go smoke and to drink. And health doesn't seem like a big deal and easily gets ignored. Health care is getting better but rich people don’t have to worry about the price of health care ,whereas, it does matter to people with less money.

Making an universal pension age will affect the economy because people are seeing that it is getting harder and harder to move up the scale and if they are born poor they are starting to get stuck as a poor person. The rich can still buy but the poor people can’t. They have to try to save money and get by. And in a world of scarcity the poor people save their money for bad habits and barely get by. In the United States we use to make it available to move up the classes but now it is getting more difficult.

Question:

Overall, how do you feel about them wanting to increase the age of retirement and what do you see as a  negative result of this choice? Will a universal pension age affect everybody in all social classes and how would it affect each class?

Works Cited:

"The Rich Are Different." The Economist 22 Dec. 2012: 116. Web.

Online access:

www.economist.com/longevity12