so you seem to be asserting that every breathing person who pays into social security is one of two people: very poor and deserving of protection and benefits of social securtiy (which you flatly avoid spelling out just how those benefits will be around in 30 years), or the wealthy who should pay out because they have other investments and should just be doing it for the good of your quasi-marxist redistributionist schema.

like other lazy analyses tossed forth without any examination of the numbers, you ignore the middle class. completely.

these are the people who are paying in now, at age 20, 30 or whatever, and who will not see ONE DIME of their money under current rates. period.

so, you want to find a way to excuse this? or will you reduce it to the middle class also having to "take one for the team" to protect today's senior citizens, only to be in poverty when they retire (and have no benefits from social security).

pure laziness.

Actually, since dogs don't have talons, no I don't know how to do that.

[T]he very point of society and law, which are intended to protect the moneyed interests…

Actually I would argue that the point of society and law is to protect the creation, not the insulation, of "moneyed interests." And if I'm a member of the working poor, that's something I would indeed cherish greatly. The best way to help the poor is by not being one of them.

Yes, it's progressive. Yes, that means you're helping others more than you're helping yourself by paying in. If we wanted a red-taloned dog-eat-dog form of capitalism, we know how to do that.

It would instantly crystallize all the class resentment and poverty-based and envy-based rage into a massive outpouring of violence which would result in the rich being slaughtered by the thousands, but it would at least be "pure." Can't avoid having a "pure" system, can we? Even if it costs our national security?

I'm a big fan of post-Marxist theories of class. I think we're at war, with each other. The rich want to get the estate tax, aka "death tax" repealed. Why? Because it apparently disincentivizes dying. Notwithstanding that all of humanity (minus, apparently, two exceptions: Lazarus and Jesus) eventually dies anyway, so taxing it will have zero impact on whether and when people do it, only on the planning they are motivated to do beforehand.

The poor try to get money redistributed. It's criminal, it is; why, it reverses the very point of society and law, which are intended to protect the moneyed interests, which are busy redistributing wealth too, upward and in ever greater concentration.

Let's knock it off about the lying, shall we? Social Security was not imposed on an unwilling Rich class, it was an accepted and acceptable trade-off. We give "them" security in retirement, and in exchange, we

- get to think of ourselves as humane to our elders (the old dog-food bit)

- give ourselves a tiny cushion, in case we fall from our perches of wealth and privilege and wind up (whisper it) poor

- redistribute wealth, net downwards

- force savings, even if it's not preserving wealth for any given individual, ie produces negative rates of return for many or most of us. Well, hell, if we were hedging against no-loss investing, there'd be no need for a safety net. You choose security, you lose potential gains. But you also avoid catastrophic loss, which lands, say it with me now, on those least able to bear the burden.

- avoid the nuisance of having to give to charitable organizations which may do as good a job as the inefficient government (Krugman keeps pointing out how low the costs of the SSA have been; sometimes private doesn't mean cheaper), since it's "already taken care of"

- stave off bloody revolution.

I think it was a wise choice for society to make back in the day, and still is.

You can disagree; you can be a pure capitalist for all of me. But I don't think pure capitalism's ever been tried, nor am I confident it ought to be. What does a man do when he finds he's been lied to, and the winner is richer as a result? He seeks redress within the system, perhaps. What does he do when it turns out the system can be bought by winners? He kicks over the system and kills the cheater who robbed him. Not a good recipe for domestic tranquillity.

For what it's worth, am I the only financial nerd interested in the calculations? I'd have to run the numbers through my HP 10b, of course. But it still works after 14 years, so why upgrade?