Easiest way to increase labor supply is to immediately increase the retirement age to 70. Welfare and retirement systems across the West are insolvent at current settings anyway.
How much additional productive work do we realistically expect people to be able to supply, from age 67 to age 70?
So, in a way, what the OP suggests will have a double “advantage”: people working longer, i.e. less pensions to pay, and people dieing sooner as they retire, so, again, less pensions to pay. Of course, it would suck massively for the common man, but that’s not an issue anymore, as nobody seems to care for the common man any longer.
Or to send kids back into coalmines.
You want a non-sadistic solution? Healthcare increases labour supply - or reduces labour supply that is sick or disabled.
Actually do we need to increase labour supply? the past couple of decades had little growth in salary becauae labour had no bargaining power. Now corporate profits are record high. A big renegotiation is about to happen and it will be good for labour
Easiest way to make citizens of a country vote for anti-immigration parties is to significantly increase immigration.
Western way of life is unsustainable and no amount of immigration will change that. To govern is to predict and the west needs to prepare itself for a post industrial, post energy hungry era.
Since 1975 productivity has grown >200%, but wages didn't. So average Joe has not seen benefits of anything really.
adding humans to the economy is good. the pie gets larger. more tax revenue. etc etc etc
Second, people crossing the southern border will never be large enough to affect the US labor market. Only increasing legal immigration can have meaningful effect on the labor supply.
The actual maximum benefit retirement age for Social Security is already 70.
The misleadingly named “full retirement age” is 67, but I don't think squeezing three more years out of the non-disabled elderly is going to do as much good for the industries where demand exists as you think.
EDIT: Also, proposing an immediate increase to the retirement age is probably the easiest way to lose one’s next election in most US constituencies; there's a reason why the increases adopted in 1983 had a phase in starting 17 years after they were passed.
I think it's incredibly cruel that they have to work at all at their age. If my mom hadn't planned her retirement well and people tried to put her back to full-time work, I would eat the cost of taking care of her needs if the state didn't. I mean she was really struggling to do her job at the end.
Easiest way to solve that problem is to increase capital gain taxes significantly.
If you do mean that people already retired but not yet 70 have their benefits cut off until they reach 70 there are a couple problems with that.
1. It would be political suicide.
2. It would be very hard to deal with the logistics. First, a large number of the people who it forces to un-retire will no longer be living where the jobs are. Your plan will tank the market for housing in retirement communities making it impossible for many to sell their houses to move back to where the jobs are.
Second, a large number of them won't be capable of doing the jobs they did before, due to age or due to their skills being out of date. Many will need retraining, or will have to take jobs in fields they have no experience with.
Dealing with all that would be a lot of work, with many reluctant to put in that effort when the workers that you do manage to get are just going to be temporary.
If you have the same rate as before of people coming into the labor force and slow the rate of people exiting the labor force, the effect on the labor force is...what, again?
However I feel like forward looking legislators could have passed gradual increases on future generations. If we know life expectancy is gradually going upwards, why not increase the retirement age incrementally based on cohort?
‘We’ actually did exactly that, over a 20 year period that just finished in 2020, under a law passed in 1983. (‘We’ also phased in increased incentive for delayed retirement past the nominal “full retirement age” at the same time, so that the actual maximum retirement age of 70 has substantially higher benefits—+24%-+32% depending on birth year—than the nominal “full retirement age” .)
Although I guess I should amend my lamentation to say that 'we' did but it wasn't nearly enough and it took them way too long to start.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Alterspy...
The bulk of people are at an age now, that they'll retire soon or are retiring. Even though we already import tons of young people (look at the amount of young males vs females - 50% of young people here have a migration background), I can't imagine we can import enough young laborers from other countries, and Germans don't reproduce nearly enough - which is understandable considering how things are going.
Also I do wonder if life expectancy increases are translating directly into the possibility of more "productive years". I wouldn't be surprised if some of the life expectancy increase is due to medical procedures that extend life at the expense of quality of life. People in these situations wouldn't be working anyway.