Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with means-testing Social Security is that the government's promised some people "Social Security will be there for you" when they were in their 20's and 30's, and now you're taking it away in their 50's or 60's, when they can't go back and adjust life / retirement plans that were made taking into account "SS will be there for you."

In my humble opinion, this kind of broken promise borders on "the government defrauding the people".

It would be more legitimate to say "SS won't be there for you if you make too much" to those in their teens and 20's just entering the workforce -- but that won't have a major effect on cash outflow needed to satisfy SS obligations for 40-ish years (except for the small fraction of rich unfortunates who get SS because they become unable to work at a young age.)

You might also argue that the level of prying into people's finances implied by "means testing" is a form of illegitimate government overreach. If you believe this, in theory you should, for consistency, also believe that individual income tax ought to be eliminated (which many people consider a radical proposition).

All those promises are "parchment guarantees", to use Madison's term. For example, social security distributions were promised to be tax exempt, and they were from the institution of the program in 1935 up until 1983 - talk about reliance interest!

I give it even odds that they'll be taxing at least some Roth distributions by the time I retire.

And presumably they’d take away my social security tax, too, right? If I was not going to get it? Right, right?

You don't see the problem with funding things like social security or food stamps purely from the people relying most on those services?

But SS isn't a tax like the rest of our general taxes. I pay a specific SS tax on my payroll so that when I retire I'm entitled to a payout. If you take away the payout you need to take away the tax. Once you means test SS it becomes more like a welfare program for seniors and ought to be paid for out of the general tax pool like other welfare programs.

I'm not necessarily opposed to social security being switched to a more conventional tax (assuming that the new tax was at least equally progressive and raised at least as much revenue). However, I also don't see how that makes much of a difference. Social security is a welfare program, it always has been.

If SS tax was repealed, and income tax was adjusted to increase by exactly the same amount, would you be happy with it?

I'm happy to vote for rearranging the labels of what the things are called if that's what the sticking point is for you.

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