The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro has some thoughts on when Americans
should and should not retire, and that's gotten a lot of attention.
- Let's watch and try to figure out why. - Let's be real about this.
It's insane that we haven't raised the retirement age in the United States.
No one in the United States should be retiring in 65 years old.
Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea.
Unless you have some sort of health problem.
Everybody that I know who is who is elderly, who has retired,
is dead within five years.
And if you talk to people who are elderly and they lose their purpose in life
by losing their job and they stop working.
Things go to hell in a handbasket real quick.
The notion that if you have to raise the retirement age to 67 or 68,
that everyone is going to fall apart.
My parents are that age. My parents are not retired.
And they shouldn't retire. It would be very bad for them to retire.
Do your parents do manual labor?
And I think it's great when people want to work past retirement age.
Most of them do cushy jobs like the one we're doing.
Jake. Yeah, right.
And that's that's fine.
But a lot of people don't do cushy jobs like the one we're doing
or the one that Ben Shapiro is doing.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say.
Look, I don't I don't want to retire either,
but I would not enforce what I like
at a, you know, desk job on everyone else.
A lot of mainstream media don't give you honest news.
We do. You know why?
Because are you paid membership on YouTube?
Makes all the difference.
Hit the join button below and you become the hero that sustains us.
But look, guys, I kind of solved this wasn't hard to solve
when Anna and Ben debated, like, easy to understand all of Ben's points
when you realize he's just talking about it from an incredibly wealthy perspective.
So when he says nobody should retire and he says, everybody I know who retired
didn't like it, or died within five years, etc., he means all the people he knows
who are almost all very wealthy.
Right? So he looks at it from that perspective.
Well, why are you putting aside your 2 or 3 businesses that you're running?
Those are kind of fun to play around with.
Well, brother, a lot of people don't have 2 or 3 businesses.
They're running and they're not doing it for fun.
Yeah, they're doing backbreaking work because they have to.
It's amazing to me that he can't see it from another person's perspective at all.
It never even occurs to him.
It's also not up to him whether someone chooses
to continue working past retirement age.
Right.
It's a decision that Americans should be able to make for themselves in
a country that's boastful about freedom.
And look, I'm going to be honest with you, Jake.
This is a cushy job in that I'm not doing manual labor.
I don't want to do this until I'm 65, 70 years old.
Are you kidding me? My brain will turn to mush.
Okay, focusing on the brain rot in Congress every single day
will lead to brain rot for myself.
Like, eventually I want to be able to retire and do things I enjoy.
Right? I'm still going to be active.
I'm still going to be working, but I'm going to be doing things,
making money, doing things I enjoy, rather than feeling forced
to continue doing a job because it's making enough money for me to survive.
You get what I'm like.
I want to make floral arrangements. I want to do carpentry.
I want to do stuff that unfortunately is not valued with high pay in this country.
Right.
But you can't do that, you know, during your working years you have to save and
save and hope and pray that you can retire at like a decent enough age where you're
still active, where you can still travel, where you can still enjoy time
with your, you know, friends and family and do hobbies that you enjoy.
Like is life just about working all day, every day?
Yeah. So I mean, two things about that.
One is he says, oh, they lose their purpose in life.
Again, just think for one second outside of your own perspective,
maybe a lot of people work not for their purpose in life, but to eat
and to provide for their family.
Most people do like that.
That thought has never even occurred to him.
That is what an incredibly wealthy person thinks.
Like, the only reason to work is to find your purpose in life.
I mean, otherwise why would you work?
You have all this money like, no, no, you're not getting it.
Most people do not have all this money.
And second of all, most importantly guys, though, he's making it sound like
we're having an interesting dialog about when we would all like to retire.
No, he's proposing to cut Social Security. So you no longer have that choice.
He's saying instead of having the age be 65, we should move it to 68, 70, 72,
whatever the number is.
By the way, Ben Shapiro did make one good point here.
I'll come back to that later.
But this central point that he's making is not about volition and choices.
He wants to take those choices away from you.
Why? Why does he need all that money?
Because they want to do more tax cuts for the rich.
So like, you could solve Social Security and Medicare just like that
by raising the cap on the income that you have to pay Social Security past.
Right. But he doesn't want that.
He doesn't want that.
That affects the beloved rich and everybody he knows.
So he's telling you, no, you have to work longer because I said so.
Look, he's making this point at a time when life expectancy
is also declining in America, right?
So people are actually not living as long as they used to.
And there's a whole host of reasons for why this is the case.
But the idea that you literally have to work
until the day you die is ridiculous to me.
And that's not look, maybe for some people the work they do is
what gives them purpose.
And I respect that for a lot of other people spending time with their families,
seeing the world, traveling, spending time with friends, that gives them purpose.
And I think people should have the freedom to make that decision,
especially after they have been dutifully paying into a system that Republicans have
been fighting tooth and nail to cut right, or to increase the retirement age
of before people could actually reap the benefits of that system.
And it's just gross.
And by the way, it's not just me saying it.
It's not just Jenks saying it. It's not just progressives saying it.
Overwhelmingly, Americans support Social Security and do not want cuts to it.
So let's go to graphic five here where, it was asked whether the government
should increase Social Security benefits or reform Social Security to reduce costs.
And when you break the answers to that question down by party, you can see that
more than half of Democrats, independents and Republicans actually prefer increasing
benefits to reforming the program.
They don't want to decrease it. They want to increase it.
Yep.
Every category, including Republicans, but all of their media hosts who are all
spectacularly wealthy and paid off by the wealthy, and all of their politicians
who are also paid off by the wealthy, tell you that they want the opposite.
Every once in a while, they'll pretend not to want to cut Social Security Medicare,
but the minute they get a chance, they're like, you should be working longer.
And Trump now saying that maybe that he should cut entitlements
once he gets into office.
So a little more data for you.
So a vast majority of Americans, only 78%, to be fair, would oppose raising the
full retirement age for Social Security from 67 to 70, while 17% would support it.
Wow. 17%.
So you've got 17% of the country on your side.
Ben Shapiro When Americans were asked whether they would support
raising the full retirement age for Social Security from 67 to 70 if it
meant that benefits would last longer.
Americans.
- Still would still oppose it. 62 to 30%. - Yeah.
They're not unclear. They're very, very clear about this.
And this is why Republicans fight tooth and nail for any improvement
of the social safety net or anything that helps the average American,
because once people get those benefits, they don't want to give them away.
Now, remember Social Security and Medicare, you pay into them.
So it's not like you're getting some sort of free benefit,
but you see that it's working for you.
It's allowing you to save money so you could retire and you like that
the government is providing that service.
Same thing happened with Obamacare. They instituted Obamacare.
And then that's why the Republicans fought a tooth and nail.
Once people had it, they couldn't get rid of it because it was
so popular even among Republican voters.
So now, if you've noticed, they stopped trying to get rid of Obamacare because
it's now popular with every demographic.
Yeah, just word to the wise, especially those who want to model
legislation that's targeted on toward one group and one group only.
Those proposals are usually not popular.
Universal proposals, though usually super popular and once enacted,
impossible to get rid of.
Yeah, and that warning that Anna's giving goes not only to the right,
but also to the left.
Yes, mostly to the left. Yeah.
So, like, if you leave out rich people, they're going to end the program.
Like there's it's ironic the Social Security and Medicare is protected partly
because it also goes to the wealthy.
So that's what it means by universal. One last thing.
I promised you that Shapiro was right about one thing he did
say at one point in that rant.
He's like, So Biden, who's 81, is telling you, you got to retire by 65.
He's 16 years past retirement age and running for office again.
He'll be 21 years past retirement age by the time his second tum is done.
Like, I know it's sophistry because really, Biden's protecting
other people, not himself.
He's not.
But but when Shapiro started talking about almost everyone in Congress is past 65,
right.
It is true.
Of course, that doesn't really help his point.
- No it doesn't. - Okay.
But it is ironic that these like, 80 year olds in Congress are like, you.
Gotta be able to retire by 65. Okay?
But you guys, some of you should also think about that.
- How come no. - One ever targets sales taxes?
Go after the sales taxes. I'll be on your side.
Actually, a lot of people will be on your side, but sales.
Taxes are complete BS. Okay. No no no no they are.
Though I know, I know, I can tell you why they don't go after.
Double taxation. You know it, I know it.
You know what? The American people know it.
- No, Anna. - You're missing it.
The reason they don't go after sales tax is because it's a regressive tax.
I know it mainly hurts us. I know.
And so for rich people that 8%, 10%, they could care less, right?
That's not their issue.
They love having you guys pay an extra 8 to 10%
so that they can save more of their money.
That is when their income is taxed.
That is a much larger chunk for them than any piddling sales tax.
Abolish sales taxes. I'm looking at you, California.