I reached a middle-age milestone this year: my oldest child got married and moved out — one down, three to go. My daughter and son-in-law, ages 19 and 21 and both employed, quickly learned about the payroll tax. Like the rest of us, they see 12.6% of every paycheck taken by the government and handed over to people like my upper-middle class parents, who definitely don’t need it.
That’s Social Security for you: a perversion of traditional values about saving, investment, and wealth transfers. Generally speaking, wealth should voluntarily flow from the old, who can’t take it with them, to the young, who could use a financial boost.
Sure, we might want a government program to stabilize incomes for the elderly poor who lacked the wherewithal to save or who risk outliving their own wealth. But a program that pays out based strictly on age, and not need? That’s not “social…
