Kai Ryssdal: A report out this week from the Goverment Accountability Office has some fairly sobering news about older workers. The GAO says the number of long-term unemployed people who are 55 and over has more than doubled since the recession started in 2007. And a lot of them have just given up looking.

Marketplace’s Sarah Gardner has more on the double whammy of a lousy job market and age bias.

Sarah Gardner: According to the Urban Institute, half of adults 62 and older end up dropping out of the workforce within 9 months of losing a job. You could call that giving up or facing reality, depending on your point of view.

Richard Johnson: Well, I think they’re facing reality.

The Urban Institute’s Richard Johnson says if you lose your job in your 50s and 60s, brace yourself. It now takes folks 55 and older more than a year to find another gig and it almost always pays way less. Sara Rix at AARP says that’s why many jobless seniors are opting to simply retire early and collect Social Security starting at 62. Problem is, by retiring early, they’re taking a 25 percent hit on their monthly benefits.

Sara Rix: By the time you’re 75 or 80 or so, when health care expenditures increase, that reduction in benefits can really have an adverse impact on financial well-being.

The Urban Institute figures workers lose an average 9 percent in retirement income for every year they’re out of the workforce. Between job layoffs, shrinking home values and disappearing pensions, the image of the carefree, golf-playing, cruise-taking retired couple begins to sound quaint. And that, says Christine Owens at the National Employment Law Project, is bad for all of us.

Christine Owens: We actually as an economy depend a lot on what seniors spend as part of our consumption-based economy.

Less money for the economy and passed onto the kids.

I’m Sarah Gardner for Marketplace.