Are All Americans Living Longer? Yes, but the rich live much longer than lower-income Americans.

For starters, it’s important to dig beneath the logical-sounding statement that Americans are living longer and are healthier. Yes, in general longevity has increased, and medical technology has made it possible for some people to live longer. But there’s more to the story, and that’s the part that didn’t get aired on Squawk Box. Rivlin said there’s a need “to adjust Social Security a little bit to the modern fact that we’re all living longer and can work longer.” All?

“Most of the increase in life expectancy in retirement has been among high income men,” explained Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank focusing on the concerns of low and middle income Americans. She pointed me to a study (pdf) done by the Social Security Administration which found that a man in the top half of the earnings distribution who retired at age sixty-five in 2006 could now expect to live nearly another twenty-two years, compared to a man who retired at the same age in 1982, whose life expectancy was only seventeen years at the time. But a man with earnings in the bottom half of the distribution retiring in 2006 could expect to live only sixteen years longer. The same man with lower earnings retiring in 1982 would have been expected to live only about fifteen more years.

So, over the decades, the top earners got five more years of life expectancy, compared with only one year for those at the bottom—reflecting the widening disparities in the country. The Social Security study didn’t look at women, but Morrissey told me that life expectancy for women hasn’t grown as much as for men. Research shows that the general pattern appears to holds for women as well.

The next obvious question is, "Will health care reform help equalize the longevity gap?" I'm betting not since high-income Americans will always be able to get better health care than lower-income Americans, but there's also very good evidence that shows the difference in longevity isn't due solely to differences in health care, rather that economic class is a primary determinant of longevity. Much of this evidence was presented in the PBS documentary series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?

So if it's the rich living longer the longest, and thus will be disproportionately straining the Social Security coffers, then why are we not talking about greatly raising or eliminating the FICA tax income limit instead of increasing retirement age and cutting Social Security benefits?

Oh, and make no mistake that increasing the retirement age is a cut in benefits. The Economic Policy Institute's Monique Morrissey is further quoted in the CJR article that, "raising the current age for full benefits to sixty-seven (which is the current law) amounts to about a 13 percent benefit cut over those two years (from sixty-five to sixty-seven). Cuts would be similar if the retirement age is raised even higher."