"Why does [name of sibling] get to [do or have desired activity or thing] and I don't? It's not fair."
"Oh, yeah. Well, life's not fair."
How many times have you been on one end or another of this parent/child conversation? I still can picture in my mind the time that my one-year-older-than-me sister was allowed to stay up late to play Monopoly with my parents and I couldn't.
As it happens, a writer at the Washington Post made this discovery about Social Security: it's full of benefits that benefit the wrong people and shortchange others, a litany of items that call to mind my first-grade self standing there in my nightgown saying, "it's not fair." (Did I really do this? I have no idea.)
The article in question, "How late-in-life dads — like Trump — are eligible for a Social Security bonus," by Allan Sloan and C. Eugene Steuerle, starts with a complaint about what it calls the "Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus" which gives supplemental benefits to parents of minor children. As Sloan and Steuerle see it, it is particularly unfair because, on the one hand, parents who have not yet reached retirement age aren't eligible to collect these benefits (unless, though the authors don't mention it, because they're widowed/widowered or disabled), and, at the same time, retirees who have children for shameful reasons (e.g., President Trump being a parent late in life because he took up with a younger trophy wife) and who don't need the money (again, Trump) are eligible.
But it is in the nature of Social Security that there is no means test, and there is no judgment of whether those late-in-life children are due to skeezy May-December relationships or because of unexpected near-menopausal pregnancies or because retirement-age individuals have adopted children, sometimes even grandchildren when their parents are unable to care for them. It's just taken as a given that household financial needs are greater with a child present so additional benefits are provided.
Also subject to criticism is the so-called "Single Parent Shortchange," which is another way of observing that the somwhat crude mechanism by which Social Security provides benefits to stay-at-home/low-earning moms, constructed in an era in which those moms were expected to be married to the fathers of their children, is a benefit that isn't earned by those women and accordingly comes from everyone else's FICA taxes. They write,
Single parents are among the lowest-income payers of Social Security taxes. Why should they subsidize other folks’ never-working spouses in a way that gives the biggest benefits to the best-off people?
The fact that Social Security accommodates divorce by providing spousal benefits to divorced ex-spouses, in the same manner as if the couple was still married, is subject to criticism as the "Serial Spouse Bonus," that is, because any given worker, if he had been married multiple times, each for over 10 years, would have multiple ex-wives able to claim spousal benefits if they exceeded benefits under their own earnings records.
And, finally, they take issue with the "Equal Earner Penalty," which they characterize as
a couple with two people each earning $40,000 gets about $100,000 less in lifetime benefits than a couple with one spouse earning $80,000 and the other earning nothing. This happens even though both couples and their employers pay identical Social Security taxes.
This is, of course, not a surprise -- again, spouses' benefits are a clunky form of social welfare spending built into Social Security. And even comparing two unmarried individuals, the progressive nature of Social Security benefits means that, in a more real-world example than a zero-lifetime-income individual, a person with a low lifetime income gets an "unfair" amount of "extra" benefits due to the 90% first-bendpoint percentage -- irrespective of whether that low income was due to having been poor, or having been a stay-at-home mom in a middle-class family.
I'll remind readers that my preferred benefit is a flat benefit, and all of these are non-issues in such a system, especially if the issue of benefits for mothers is solved by giving accrual credits to individuals who were out of the workforce caring for children, rather than adjusting benefits at retirement, or, alternatively, by not caring at all about employment history in handing out benefits.
But such a system would generate its own cries of unfairness: why should Bill Gates get a benefit if he doesn't need one? Why should that fat slob who never worked get one?
Ultimately, all these cries of unfairness really highlight the ways that Social Security does dual duty as a social welfare program for the elderly and as a mainstream income-replacement retirement program. People want it both ways -- they want to feel they're "earned" their benefits but at the same time, they want benefits to be progressive, with the needy getting more and the wealthy paying more. And when it comes to proposed updates to the system, we see even more of these two impulses, as pundits and ordinary Joes and Janes alike simultaneously insist that workers have earned every penny of their future benefits by dint of their own hard work and FICA taxpaying, and yet, in order to repair the solvency of the system, that the millionaires and billionaires had better be called upon to pay in their "fair share," that is, subsidize the system.
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