The head of Goldman Sachs wants to raise your retirement age

Lloyd Blankfein, the 57-year-old CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was paid more than $16 million dollars last year, appeared on CBS last night to talk about the Fiscal Cliff and lay some truth on the American people: You all need to work longer. 

You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. ... So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

As Ezra Klein and others before me have noted, it is very easy for people like Blankfein who are paid outrageous sums of money to sit in offices, think, and talk to tell Americans they should delay retirement. After all, they probably aren't pining for for the day they get to stop working. Same goes for senators who would prefer to croak while prattling on during a floor speech and for national journalists who intend to keep writing until they finally go blind from staring at a monitor. They like their jobs. They don't want to leave them. 

However, it might not be so easy for your average American, particularly one with a numbingly repetitive or physically taxing occupation, to work those extra years. 

Read more at The Atlantic.