Why not just raise the age to collect Social Security to 100? The Beltway elite never cease in their games to wreck the lives of ordinary Americans nor to impose their snobbery on all of us lesser beings. The Holy Grail of the establishment pigs is to break the backs of the average Joe and Jane on Main Street by turning Medicare over to the insurance industry parasites and looting Social Security funds in order to give the money to the Wall Street looters to gamble with. They are able to get away with this largely due to a corrupt media what hammers away at both programs as “entitlements” when in fact they are paid for by Americans with payroll deductions or in the form of the self-employment tax.

By speaking in terms of the elite’s own language working people are using the knife that they have been given to cut their own throats. Medicaid is an entitlement, food stamps are an entitlement but Social Security and Medicare are not and the sooner that folks stop buying the bullshit peddled by the establishment the better off that they will be. If there are to continue to be hikes in the eligibility age then people who have been forced to pay into the programs for their entire working lives should have the option to withdraw their money tax free and then do what they will with it to plan for their retirements.

Washington Post editorial page vampire Robert J. Samuelson is calling for another raise in the age to collect Social Security. In his column “Yes, We Can Work Longer” the mustachioed wonder calls for once again moving the goalposts.

Can Americans work longer? Or are we so broken down by our 60s that extending work life would be cruel? These questions stalk the debate over Social Security and Medicare. Critics of current policy, including me, have long urged that eligibility ages slowly rise to reflect longer life expectancy. Not so fast, counter others. Just because people live longer doesn’t mean they can — or should — work longer.

We now have a new study that confronts the question. The answer: an emphatic yes. “Most people are healthy enough to work longer than they do now,” write economists Courtney Coile of Wellesley College, Kevin Milligan of the University of British Columbia and David Wise of Harvard. Most Americans could work another two to four years without adverse consequences, they say.

That would move the current eligibility age for full benefits from today’s 66 to somewhere between 68 and 70. Presumably, the increase would be phased in to give people time to adjust. (The full eligibility age is already scheduled to increase slowly to 67 by the end of the next decade.)

Of course, health issues alone won’t settle the issue. Millions of Americans regard a lengthy retirement as something they’ve been promised. They don’t want it cut, even if life expectancy has increased. (At birth, U.S. life expectancy is now 79 years, up from 70 years in 1960.) Their position is that Social Security spending should automatically increase to cover longer retirements.

Samuelson refers to the study by the National Bureau of Economic Research which is another one of those policy organizations that are as thick as fleas on a dog and which often have funding sources that are intentionally murky and are usually fronts for interests that stand to benefit from crony capitalism. The writer scoffs at the idea that workers in some professions wear down faster and that it would be somehow cruel to hit them with the big bait and switch, his main argument is that life expectancy has greatly increased. But we are not living longer. The life expectancy of white working class males is in dropping like a rock as they face dwindling economic prospects and a loss of hope in the globalized world as well as a callous disregard from guys like Samuelson and the people that pay his salary.

For a guy who sits on his ass in front of a computer all day it’s difficult to see how he can possibly relate to anyone who has done physical work for a lifetime. People do break down and these programs are there to provide them some dignity in their waning years and since they have already paid for them they shouldn’t have to deal with being cheated when it’s time to collect. But this is the same dude who recently blamed Americans for not buying enough crap on credit at exorbitant interest rates to boost Obama’s phony economic recovery in an election year. Samuelson serves as a textbook example of an elitist water-carrier for the Washington cartel, the exact type of political lickspittle that has fed up Americans out shopping for pitchforks.