The Rich Are Living Longer and Taking More From Taxpayers

The headline makes that claim, but the article's figures do not support the claim.

EDIT: I think I did misinterpret something. When you account for taxes paid, I think it is still well on the progressive side, rather than being even. May be moreso in the future, because it's pay-as-you-go.

My broader point was that a lack of modernization in how benefits are earned and paid out are reducing the payouts over-time for some of the poorest recipients of these sorts of programs. Giving subsistence income to the destitute helps to a point, but doesn't go far enough to really elevate one's standard of living to one which substantially increases health and reduces stress. Someone earning only $900/month probably isn't going to pay $100 for blood work and an x-ray as often as they should.

People making that are doing pretty well in relative terms.

I guess the cutoff for 'wealthy' is often higher than that though.

The feature that does make social security progressive it's the diminishing contribution to benefit ratio a lifetime contributions increase.

Given that, sure, the top 7% or 1% or the 0.1% don't fund SS proportionately (but they also do not receive higher benefits than the people at exactly $127,000).

The article isn't really talking about the 0.1% or 1%, though, which is a tiny portion of SS payouts, but instead the top 20% or 40% (top quintiles).

The first pays $3500 per year in SS tax, the second pays $8750, and the third $8750. But each one gets the same SS benefit (assuming same number of working quarters and lifespan).

You are right about tax rates, but those rates don't affect the benefit.

The article makes the point that lifespans are not equal, which tilts the SS program in the regressive direction. But (unless I misread the numbers), SS is still a progressive system overall.

Social security is taxed on individual income, so you shouldn't look at this like a household income figure.

That's not what the article is saying. According to the table it gives, the life expectancy of the bottom 20% is still 76.1 years. That's not "young". It is significantly younger than the top 20%.

> wealth inequality is pretty important in terms of quality of life

I think it's hard to make this case just based on life expectancy; what we really need is some way of quantifying how healthy the bottom 20% are from, say, age 60 on (or even earlier), compared to the top 20%. I suspect that this would show a much larger disparity than just the life expectancy data.

https://www.thenation.com/article/why-are-poor-americans-dyi...

As for how socioeconomic inequalities translate into inequities in life span, “It’s rather mysterious,” said Lisa Berkman, the director of the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University. One answer is that low-income people tend to be sicker in the first place, because the neighborhoods they can afford to live in are more polluted; because they can’t afford to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors; because they can’t afford health insurance premiums, copayments, and prescription drugs.

Woolf accounts much of the disparity in death rates to what he calls “stress-related conditions.” People who aren’t secure economically are likely to experience high levels of stress, which studies have linked to shorter lifespans and a heightened risk of death from strokes, heart attacks, and other illnesses. “We’re seeing a dramatic increase in deaths from opioids, whether we’re talking about prescription painkiller or heroin, but also from suicides, liver disease, and other conditions that I personally feel come from different ways that people are coping, in an unhealthy way, with the stresses that they’re facing in their daily lives,” Woolf said, particularly since the recession. Smoking, the leading cause of preventable death, takes a particularly costly toll on low-income people.

Berkman traces at least some of the stress load on lower-income Americans to changes in the workplace. The 1920s cohort analyzed by the Brookings researchers had their greatest earnings in the 40s and 50s, a time of economic growth and greater equality across the income spectrum. While low-income people born in the 1940s entered a labor market that was less demanding physically, they may also have experienced greater insecurity as wages stagnated, and difficulty balancing work and family life as more women entered the workforce. Unlike many other peer countries with more robust family support, the United States didn’t do much to accommodate the increased challenges facing working parents, Berkman noted. “The second wave of occupational risk are sets of working conditions that are hugely stressful,” she said. “They aren’t so physically stressful, but they’re socially stressful. They’re insecure, they’re inflexible, or they have no ability to balance work and family issues. We need to rethink what occupational health and safety is.”