The problem with "solving inequality" is there is no incentive for one to do better. If one can live as well as everyone else, with no effort, why should one make the effort?

I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead.

Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it.

Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.

Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.

They shouldn't get any.

This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.

> They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.

That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s.

If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no ability to work.

But they don't have to do those things. We're a service economy now and most of that involves sitting at a desk or very light office labor. They can still do that to sustain their lifestyle. Failing that, they could liquidate assets.

We're handing out money to people as a treat for their 65th b-day while the national debt is continuing to rise and their kids are crushed under loan debt, medical debt, and further revenue extraction to keep the shares backing retirement accounts increasing in value.

They get much more out of it than they paid in. The younger cohorts get much less out of it than they paid in.

Thats not insurance, that’s generational fraud. It’s a ponzi scheme.

> If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around.

By that logic, when the population was 25% less than it is now (~1980s), there was a job for everyone.

>... If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).

Economists refer to this idea as the lump of labour fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

> Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable.

That presumes there are a fixed number of jobs. Anyone can create a job, even doing simple things like going door to door and offering to mow the lawn.

Social security is already a redistribution scheme, it already is more complicated.

Because that cannot continue in perpetuity. The cracks are already starting to show. If I were in my 60s faced with the real possibility of living another 15-30 years I'd want the younger people to feel like they had something to look forward to. Many young and middle-aged people in the US don't feel that way. What they can't get through the ballot box, they'll get other ways, ways that will cause others to say "I'm not saying I agree, I'm saying I understand."

It's the job of government to make sure that doesn't happen, not cater to it.