The second half is more remarkable

Paul Krugman:

But my guess is that in a week or two we will once again hear a supposed wise man saying that we need to raise the retirement age to 67 because of higher life expectancy, unaware that (a) life expectancy hasn’t risen much for half of workers (b) we’ve already raised the retirement age to 67.

I completely understand why part a is misleading -- poorer workers get less social security already and making them work longer means fewer years of benefits increasing the benefits to wealthier contributors, who already get more per month. 

But the second part is the piece that I find truly remarkable.  I mean how hard could it be for the media to fact check that raising eligibility to 65 is current law?  Sure, you might want to protect the law but that is a completely different argument for forgetting that the low changed in 1983.  Or you could want to phase it in faster, but that would also be a) a different argument and b) seemingly ill-timed with the changes in the 401(k) system.

So I could imagine some debate about the first part (based around potential short term trends and the fact that we don't have the complete death curve for the population).  But the second is simply . . .  odd.