The graying of the American workforce continues: Baby boomers are working longer and earning more than their predecessors did in what Americans typically think of as retirement years, new research finds.

Almost 20% of Americans ages 65 and older were employed this year, according to a new report from Pew Research Center. That’s nearly double the share of those who were working 35 years ago. In total, there are around 11 million Americans 65 or older who are working today, comprising 7% of all wages and salaries paid by U.S. employers. In 1987, they made up 2%.

And not only are more Americans at or above the traditional retirement age of 65 working, but they are also earning substantially more compared with what older workers earned in the 1980s. Now, the typical older worker earns $22 per hour, compared with $13 per hour then. Their wage growth—some of which can be attributed to their working longer hours than older Americans did in the past—has outpaced that of workers ages 25 to 64 over the same time period, according to Pew’s research, which is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and the Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking.

  • penguin
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    1 year ago

    Every year, the government funds itself with taxes being paid now. Not years previously. If older people who are retired use the hospital, the hospital’s resources were paid for by the most recent taxes.

    And when I pay my taxes now, the government doesn’t take a small percentage of it, put it aside, and mark it as “for road maintenance in X decades”.

    If working people stopped paying taxes, all programs would collapse entirely, they wouldn’t keep working only for retired people who paid into them sufficiently.

    It’s pretty obvious that all of government needs tax payers every year