It’s budget season in Washington, which means the politicians are delivering their annual warnings about the looming Social Security crisis. How big of a crisis — and how close it looms — is largely within their control, and there are basically three proposals to address it: one from House Republicans, one from President Joe Biden, and one from former President Donald Trump.

Trump’s plan is so bad that Republicans decided to attribute it to Biden instead. The budget proposal from the House’s Republican Study Committee, released earlier this month, points out that if no changes are made, the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted by 2032. “Ignoring this fact, as the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats have, will lead to the largest across-the-board cuts to current Social Security retirement beneficiaries in history,” its report reads.

This is a valid point. But “do nothing and let massive automatic benefit cuts occur” is in fact Trump’s position on Social Security, not Biden’s. The Biden administration released a Social Security plan earlier this month that would restore solvency to the trust fund by raising taxes on people who earn more than $400,000 a year.

As for House Republicans? Their plan calls for raising the retirement age “to account for increases in life expectancy.” They realize this is risky — the Biden administration has already pounced on it — which may explain their attempt to sow confusion by pretending their nominee’s plan is actually the other guy’s.

Painful changes needed, but …

Nonetheless, the plan from the Republican Study Committee, which represents almost 80% of the party’s House membership, is worth taking seriously. And in the universe of possible benefit cuts, the GOP preference for a higher retirement age is one of the worst possible options. It’s essentially a benefit cut that targets people with below-average life expectancy. Social Security needs painful changes, but it’s a strangely regressive choice to make them at such a cost to a group that’s poorer than average.

Progress on life expectancy has been very uneven across U.S. society. Educated Americans are living much longer than we used to, but those without bachelor’s degrees are not. Contemporary Republicans like to cast themselves as champions of the working class, but they haven’t updated their policy playbook on major issues accordingly.

Beyond the specific class skew, meanwhile, there’s just something peculiar and cruel about singling out people in poor health for benefit cuts.

On average, the rich are in better shape than the poor. But there are exceptions. And almost everyone would trade money for better health and longer life if they had the opportunity. Increasing the retirement age essentially singles out the very worse-off class of elderly people — and makes them worse off.

Then there is the already-regressive nature of Social Security: The richer you are, the larger your monthly benefit check. Liberals generally admire Social Security for being a “universal” program rather than a means-tested one, providing a guarantee of dignified retirement to all Americans without a lot of elaborate administrative rigamarole. But most people’s understanding of a universal program is something like a public library or a bus — a service available on equal terms to everyone. Social Security is not like that. It pays larger benefit checks to higher-income people who paid more taxes during their working life.

The theoretical rationale here is that Social Security is supposed to be a kind of mandatory insurance program with a pension-like structure of payments and payouts.

In reality, though, Social Security is redistributive — those who pay higher taxes receive higher benefits, but not in proportion to what they pay. The point of the Democrats’ tax-raising plan is to make the program more redistributive.

But precisely because the existing benefit structure is skewed to the rich, you can achieve the Democratic goal of making the program more redistributive — and the Republican goal of cutting spending — by simply making the program flatter. Take the current 80th percentile of benefits (or 60th or 40th or whatever number you want to compromise on), and make it the maximum benefit. That creates a spending cut that targets not exactly rich people, but at least non-poor people. And because more affluent people live longer, reducing an affluent person’s monthly check does more for the Treasury than cutting spending on the poor.

A tax cut for those who keep working?

All this said, the idea of raising the retirement age is not completely without merit. In fact, the research shows that retirement itself is something of a mixed blessing.

There are clearly people who, due to their physical condition or the nature of their work, benefit from the opportunity to retire earlier rather than later. On average, however, retiring seems to lead to worse physical and mental health due to a reduction in activity and social connectedness.

Beyond the narrow budgetary questions of retirement programs, there is clearly a large economic benefit to having able-bodied people work rather than not, even if they are in their 60s or 70s. Rather than cut benefits for those who want to retire, America might consider cutting taxes on people who choose to continue working past retirement age. At the very least, the government shouldn’t actively discourage the elderly from participating in the labor market.

The main health benefits of continued work seem to accrue with part-time hours — it’s avoiding total inactivity, in other words — and for many people that may be the ideal situation. Part-time work gives the able-bodied elderly a continued connection to coworkers and a role in the national economy, while also generating additional free time to spend with grandchildren or on hobbies. The U.S. should consider creating an active labor market program oriented toward connecting sixty- and seventy-something people with part-time job opportunities.

Smaller tax increases, more careful cuts

It may be boring to say that Republicans want to cut benefits and Democrats want to raise taxes, and that the best solution is some kind of bipartisan compromise that does a mix of the two. But realistically, the optimal policy probably involves tax increases smaller than Biden proposes paired with spending cuts more careful than Republicans suggest.

At least both parties agree — one explicitly, one implicitly — that there is no place in this debate for Trump’s reckless indifference.

Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”

Related Articles

Letters: In Cobb case, was deadly force authorized?

Lisa Jarvis: Biden’s $12 billion for women’s health should be just a start

Adam Minter: March Madness as we know it faces extinction

Murphy, Sperling: How a California climate win could end up destroying rainforests — and what to do about it

David French: America’s most overlooked political divide is also its most revealing

My 12-year-old son creates some wacky board games. When he was younger, there was Pillow Fight, where players spin a wheel to collect pillows to smack people, build a fort, or knock down pins. Then there was Chick-fil-A vs. Canes, a game where players collect coins by buying, selling, and promoting menu items from Texas’ favorite fast-food chicken places—but if you get stingy and don’t pay your workers, they’ll go on strike and you’ll find yourself without food. Recently, his creations have turned into more sophisticated battle strategy games, played according to pages and pages of rules. 

For someone who’s always been painfully shy, board gaming is the language my son uses to engage with others. Sit down and play a board game with him, and after a few minutes he will reveal his personality in a way that he typically can’t in a classroom. That’s why I cried when I saw The Hobby. 

Premiering at South by Southwest (SXSW) on March 8, the character-driven documentary The Hobby takes its title from what those in the board gaming world name their larger community and culture. Writer and director Simon Ennis, an avid board gamer who got hooked while working at a video store, follows designers as they reveal their creative process and players as they find community in this world. 

Over the years, my family has collected two dozen games; we have a loose board game group; and we hang out at board game cafes. But The Hobby showed me how much bigger this world is. Toward the beginning of the film, masses of people from all backgrounds and walks of life descend onto the floor of the Gen Con, the largest tabletop game convention in North America, held every year in Indianapolis, Indiana. In this tight-knit subculture, where game designers and reviewers like podcaster Tom Vasel are treated like superstars, Vasel jokingly tells Ennis, “As soon as I leave, no one knows who I am.” 

In the film, Thi Nguyen, philosophy professor at the University of Utah and author of Games: Agency as Art, tells Ennis that “the hobby” embraces “those who don’t fit into this world too well.” Nguyen says in his book: “In ordinary life, we have to desperately fit ourselves to the practical demands of the world.” And in that world, where we are driven by constant demands to be productive, to finish tasks, to achieve—where playing a three-hour game of Settlers of Catan might seem like a waste of time—it’s easy to see why people find a reprieve in “the hobby.” Nguyen theorizes that there is a “motivational inversion” for hobbyists—unlike athletes or others who compete to win or achieve a certain goal, hobbyists see the goal of winning as a means to creative play, to socializing with others for hours on end. When Ennis asks players and designers what the most important aspect of “the hobby” is, they all say, “It’s the people that matter most” or “the shared experience.” 

From the bird’s-eye view of the board gaming world at Gen Con, Ennis dives into the lives of some serious players, including Mik, Starla, and Grant Fitch—an African-American family whose time with each other playing turned into penning reviews on social media and a family Youtube channel called Our Family Plays Board Games. Ennis also features his close friend and fellow member of his board game group Dan Corbett. Together with other friends, they survived the isolation of the pandemic by playing board games in Corbett’s cabin in the woods.

It is this experience that gets the competitive Corbett hooked, and the audience follows him while he prepares for and plays in the World Series of Board Games in Las Vegas. Like the World Series we’re more familiar with, tournaments at this World Series are highly organized events where professional commentators analyze games live on video, and winners receive chunky gold championship rings. Unlike the World Series we’re more familiar with, there’s no trash-talking from fans or sign-stealing from players—just a whole lot of admiration and love from fellow competitors. Corbett comes shy of winning a tournament, but Hanshi Li, a self-deprecating immigrant from Guangzhou, China, who met his wife in “the hobby,” takes the ultimate $25,000 award in the final game of the Viking-themed Blood Rage. Li says for him, “the hobby” is “the purest form of social interaction.” 

It is this unique and shared experience that game designers strive to cultivate when they build a game. The audience learns through the stories of both beginner and expert designers that anyone can create a board game about virtually anything. We journey with newbie designers like musician Candace Harris and soft-spoken John Hague, as they craft, test, and launch their games, which are as varied as the interests of their creators. Harris’ game Stage Left is a music-themed deck-building game and Hague’s The Last Summit a postapocalyptic political diplomacy game. Ennis also shows that the designers’ processes are just as varied: Blood Rage designer Eric Lang starts by playing with game pieces on his bed, while Elizabeth Hargrave built a spreadsheet of her scientific research on the class, genus, habitat, wingspan, nest type, eggs, food, and endangered status of birds to create the game Wingspan.

Perhaps the only distracting element of The Hobby was the character that bookends the film: a snooty, wizened curator from the British Museum, who only likes to play board games from antiquity. The board game snob is atypical among hobbyists. Overall, Ennis creates intimate portraits of diverse characters who are so earnest and open about their struggles, desires, and vulnerabilities that you find yourself cheering for them as they all proceed on their individual journeys. Openness, Ennis said later at a SXSW panel, is a hallmark of this community—and that shines through in the film. 

“The hobby,” Nguyen writes in his book, is a break from the indifferent and arbitrary world we seem to face: “In games, we can engineer the world of the game,” its rules, objectives, environment, narrative, and “the agency we will occupy to fit our desires.” 

It’s a kind of creative control that my 12-year-old son lacks in the broader world, as he navigates the increasing demands of homework, tests, and peer pressure, while we adults struggle to keep up with deadlines, bills, and everything else that makes us forget why we do the things we do. Thankfully, Ennis shows us that through “the hobby,” even if it’s just for a few hours, we can forget the incessant demands of the world, enjoy the company of others, and just play.