[KarlInOhio]

Which will turn it into a giant wealth redistribution scheme.

It already is. I sat down and figured out the SS payments for two people, one who made the SS max income all of his career and a second who made exactly half of that so he paid one half the tax. When it came time to collect, the lower income person got three quarters of the payments of the higher tax payer. If the higher number served as the baseline, than means the lower paid one got a 50% bonus over the proportional payment.

I had planned to find the payment level which exactly matched the average tax and benefit and use that as the baseline to calculate all of the other tax/payment rates relative to it, but I could not figure out how to automate the entry of payroll data into the SS website so I only did two by hand.

[Chad_the_Impaler]

The most important thing for understanding this issue is the existence of three bend points. Below the first bend point, SS will provide 90% or your working income, then it changes to only 32% until the second bend point, after which it changes again to 15%. Finally, when you reach the maximum benefit, the percentage changes to 0%. Also the bend point threshold numbers are indexed for inflation every year.

[rlmorel]

Hahaha...so true.

When I posted, I re-read it, and thought the same thing and was going to post an addendum saying “it already is” and then decided not to...:)

But yes. It is.