> Why the hell are they able to collect on that?

People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.

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.