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The most regressive aspect of social security is simply that poor people die younger than rich people.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44846 (pdf warning)
There is about a 10 year gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest. Which overwhelms nearly any difference in generosity between payouts and the taxes collected.
In general I think social security is a horribly designed system for multiple reasons:
Even if it is a horrible system. I don't think we are getting rid of it. I'm guessing the US government will continue to take the easy way out. They will inflate their way out of the obligations, and slowly scale back how much they pay. Anyone in my generation (30's) would be an idiot for making any retirement plans based on social security payments.
The whole thing should probably be replaced with a disability insurance system.
As you become disabled from doing certain types of work you can receive payments to supplement your income back up to where it would have been. With benefits maxing out at some minimum standard of living. If you were once a construction worker at $20 an hour, but you hurt your back and can now only be a walmart greeter at $10 an hour, then the disability payments make up for that lost $10 in wages. If you instead learn how to program and start making $50 an hour you get no payments.
Possible adjustments to the system if you want to be a nanny state:
Is this not true of any store of value system? Ultimately the question of caring for the old is a question of how the resources of those that are young enough to work will be redistributed to those who are too old to work and what precisely counts as too old to work. If we allowed old people to save thing X in their productive years, protect thing X from being taken with force by those who are young enough and strong enough to do so, and thing X is then used a store of value to pay those who are young and strong for food, services, etc. then we are essentially back in the same place.
This isn't to argue for or against social security, but simply to point out that any system to care for the elderly is going to do so by using some element of coercive redistribution on the young because the scarce element is their productivity.
Seems like a bit of topsy turvy logic to call "not allowing young people to steal" the same as "coercive redistribution". Most people would consider is "coercive redistribution" if you did allow young people to just steal whatever resources they wanted just because they are young and strong.
Old people aren't the only ones who like to save resources, I'm young, I still like to save up and occasionally splurge on larger purchases. A system of saving benefits everyone. Even if I knew for a fact that retirement was unavailable to me I'd still often save money. I wouldn't be saving as much maybe, but still saving.
Saving valuable assets is really just a continuation of owning that thing in the first place. If you want to think of ownership as coercive, then sure go ahead. I wouldn't want to live in a world without ownership. There probably isn't enough common ground for us to have an economic discussion if you believe ownership is coercive.
The idea of stealing and the system that disallows it are just social technologies and systems that are agreed upon prior. "Don't steal and that's the law" isn't different in principle from "young people have to support old people and that's the law." In fact, both are pretty straightforwardly Biblical.
Ownership relies on violence which means it's not coercive only by some means of special pleading, which you make pretty explicit by hinting that it's not coercive because you prefer to live in a world that includes it. That's fine for what it's worth, but recognize it more forthrightly. It is coercive, just a type that you specifically prefer.
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Good point, thanks for the link.
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