though. While overall life expectancy is undoubtedly longer than it was when SS was originally put in place, the life expectancy of someone who reaches the age of 65 is not THAT much longer than the life expectancy of someone who reached 65 in the 1940s. It's just that in the 1940s a lot of people died young which was a drag on overall life expectancy. But if you DID make it to 65, you tended to live a good bit beyond 65 (or 68). That said, many people who died young paid into the system and did not take a benefit out... so I think the bigger problem (purely from the standpoint of SS finances) is that more people are living long enough to collect social security, than did when SS was first put in place.

I don't think the full retirement age of 67 needs to be raised. It's unreasonable to expect everyone to work until they're 70. But I do think we can make the "penalty" for taking social security at 62 or 65 bigger than it is to encourage more people to wait until full retirement. Currently 1 in 3 workers start taking social security at age 62. I think we could also tweak to benefit to payout ratio for high earners... and also make tweaks to the cap.