> Why the hell are they able to collect on that?
People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
> Why the hell are they able to collect on that?
People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it.
Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.
Why should they get back any?
It's insurance. It's there in the name. Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance.
I get far less value back than I pay into my property insurance, unless, of course, I've had a fire or a disaster. That means I've presented a need for the insurance. A casualty has occurred. I have a claim. I can then access the value that I paid into the insurance fund.
I don't write the insurance company and upbraid them for not helping me out on the down payment for a house, because I understand the meaning of the word "insurance".
We essentially have a bunch of people writing exactly that letter.
They shouldn't get any.
This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
SS was set up as an annuity, not a charity.
It was set up as neither.
It's a taxpayer-funded insurance policy, where the risk is you being alive without a way to earn a living. We have effectively managed that risk for a very large portion of the people who are collecting on that insurance policy by switching over to a service economy where most jobs do not require the physical labor that an elderly person cannot safely do. Furthermore, they're also the portion of the population with the longest time to have accumulated assets.
If you want to keep the insurance policy sustainable for the next generation - who is also paying into it - you need to treat it like an insurance policy. If you allow people to make any and all claims against the funds backing an insurance policy, the funds will eventually be depleted as there will be more people withdrawing from it than paying in. You also have to account for the opportunity cost of the people paying into that system not paying into something else, like our ballooning national debt, or the debts that many Americans of working age have to take on to maintain a decent standard of living.