RE: Comment About Ron Gebhardtsbauer's Position Paper

[Ron Gebhardtsbauer <gebhardtsbauer@actuary.org>]

James,

Thank you for your kind review of my material.  I like your responses and wanted to respond to your thought on having lower retirement ages for some people.  In Chile's former system, they had different retirement ages for different industries, but it caused lots of confusion.  For example, if you changed jobs, what would your retirement age be?  If you wanted to take advantage of the system, you could switch to a heavy industry job say when you were age 52, so that you could take advantage of their lower retirement age.  Eventually, it just didn't work for Chile, which is one of the reasons they switched to their new privatized system.

On the other hand, I can see why you would want to accomodate people's special situations.  For example, it might be good to loosen the disability rules.  Some people just won't be healthy enough after age 65 to get an appropriate (decent) job for someone that age.  Thus, we might want to accomodate them by easing the rules for getting a disability benefit, and in fact, Social Security already has that for people approaching age 65.

Ron