It is absolutely a "fair" and "just" thing for a society to do to itself.
... you'll notice that taken to absurdity this is the same statement as "everyone should be paid the same". And that's been tried.
Let's also add fines and traffic tickets to the list of things that ought be more expensive as one becomes wealthier please.
It seems to me like government programs is a poor delineation, as government can pass a law to extend its own scope.
Why not groceries or clothes?
Well, programs like TANF and SNAP exist, which I think are great and their greatest problems are they are not easy enough for people to make use of.
So, fair point, when looking at the most impoverished among us I do not think we should stop at governmental services.
Feels like we're splitting hairs a bit here.
I guess im still looking for some limiting principle. Why not just mandate that all goods are sold proportional to income.
There are ways to disentangle the undesirable incentives. The Nordic countries in particular have done a great job of this.
This was reality under the Soviet system, and was one of the main reasons it failed.
Now, I understand why I am getting all the cheeky responses and the downvotes. People are hurting. Capitalism in the US is currently failing under a different failure mode. The capitalists are relentless optimizers, even past the point where optimizing their metrics stops making sense. Their metric is "extract as much wealth from the populace as possible", and it's gotten to the point where the people are disillusioned, and very soon there will be nothing left to take.
It is in no way like insurance today, and never has been. It has always paid out independent of circumstance. It was never about equity either - The poor get less, and the very poorest get none. Again, this is the way it has been since conception.
It is a state mandated pension with low returns and a progressive fee. Noting more.
My analogy to insurance was more about whether you pay into "your" account with your name on it or if you pay into a big fund directly pays out to recipients, and nothing is held aside for you.
The money isnt held in a dedicated account with your name on it. However, how much you pay in is rigorously tracked and used to directly to determine how much you get.
The closest thing is a pension. Like a pension, SS pays out X% of your taxable salary. X is progressive with high earners heavily subsidizing low earners.
SS starts by paying out 90% of taxable salary in the lowest bracket. As income goes up, this reduces to paying out 15% in the top bracket. The brackets are referred to SS bend points.
I agree; it was a poor choice of analogy on my part.