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Where to begin? The premise that the working class is ripped off by SocSec and Medicare is laughable for at least these reasons:

- (best-kept secret of the SocSoc system) The more you make the less you get (as a percentage of what you paid in). Someone making an inflation-adjusted $60,000 per year during their working career retiring at Normal Retirement Age this year will get a benefit of about $18,000. Someone in the same situation except with $30,000 per year career earnings will get a benefit of about $13,000. So the person who paid twice as much into the system gets a benefit that's less than 50% more. The lower middle-class gets a hugely disproportionate share of SocSec benefits.

- Additionally, the upper-middle income earner is much more likely to have to pay federal income tax, or a higher level of income tax, on his Social Security benefit. The worst case is that he has to pay tax on 85% of his benefits. So there already effectively is a form of means-testing that is run through the income tax system.

- Every dollar of earnings is taxed for Medicare (There is no cap at $88,000), even though the benefits paid to retirees in the form of covered costs are the same regardless of income level. This means that someone making $1 million will pay $29,000 into Medicare (the 1.45% employee and 1.45% employer portions). There's no way this person will ever get that money back in Medicare benefits.This is a direct (and huge) transfer of wealth from the "rich" to the lower and middle class.

Those are the easy points to make--There are others, but these will do for now. The author's ignorance is breathtaking.

All due respect, you are mixing apples, oranges and grapefruit. Apples as FICA, oranges as Income Taxes and grapefruit as possible benefits.

Assume for a moment that two 65 year old people die on their way to apply for SS benefits. One had always made at the cap. The other had always made at 10 times the cap. Neither one will get anything out of SS now that they are dead. One paid 12.4% FICA during their working years. The other paid 1.24%. Fair?

Your are right on the mark. People don't realize also that payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare and the like) are nearly as large as the revenue collected from income taxes (40 percent vs 44 percent). The remaining 16 percent comes primarily from excise and corporate taxes, which the consumer pays eventually. If we don't fix these entitlement systems soon, we will have very little discretionary money (Defense is considered a discretionary expense) left in the Federal budget, especially when we also have to pay for the servicing of our increasing national debt.