‘It’s Totally Crazy!’ Ben Shapiro Rages At The Retirement Age Day After Trump Says Open to ‘Cutting’ Entitlements
Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro raged against President Joe Biden’s recent budget proposal on Monday, calling the president’s economic policies “depraved” while arguing the retirement age must go up.
“It’s insane that we haven’t raised the retirement age in the United States. It’s totally crazy!” Shapiro said during his lengthy rant against Biden, adding:
Joe Biden, if that were the case, Joe Biden should not be running for president. OK? Joe Biden is 81 years old. The retirement age in the United States, at which you start to receive Social Security and you are eligible for Medicare, is 65. Joe Biden has technically been eligible for Social Security and Medicare for 16 years, and he wants to continue in office until he is 86, which is 19 years past when he would be eligible for retirement.
No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem.
Shapiro continued, claiming, “Everybody that I know 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.”
He then dove into some of the history of when 65 was established as the retirement age:
But put all of that aside, just on a fiscal level and on a logical level, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt established 65 as the retirement age, the average life expectancy in the United States was 63 years old. Today, the average life expectancy in the United States is close to 80.
It’s totally insane that you believe that you should be able to work from the time that you are essentially 20 to the time that you are 65, which is a 45 year period, you pay in, and then you’ll receive Social Security benefits sufficient to support you and your family, you and your wife or whatever, for, like, another 20 years.
That’s crazy talk. That is not fiscally sustainable. The notion that if you have to raise the retirement age to 67 or 68, that everyone is gonna 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.
Shapiro’s screed dropped the day after former President Donald Trump was confronted on CNBC about his fiscal policies, which the anchor argued were similar to Biden’s.
“Have you changed your your outlook on how to handle entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid? Mr. President, it seems like something has to be done or else we’re going to be stuck at 120% of debt to GDP forever,” CNBC’s Joe Kernan asked Trump.
“So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things, numbers of things you can do. So I don’t, you know, necessarily agree with the statement,” Trump replied.
A spokesperson for Trump quickly walked back the remark saying, “President Trump delivered on his promise to protect Social Security and Medicare in his first term, and President Trump will continue to strongly protect Social Security and Medicare in his second term.”
Watch the clip above.
