James Kwak over at The Baseline Scenario has an interesting post that addresses the question: are Social Security and Medicare programs just for the elderly? His answer:
But the problem with this framing is that “the elderly” change every year. There’s nothing inherently wrong or unfair with a program in which you pay insurance premiums while you work and collect benefits when you retire. Saying such a program benefits the elderly is like saying that life insurance doesn’t benefit the insured, only the beneficiaries: it’s true in a trivial sense, but people still want and buy life insurance anyway.
As he says, there is a much more interesting question: Are the programs worth it?
So the real question is whether you would pay 12.4 percent of your wages for roughly 40-45 years in order to get back that distribution of replacement rates for about 20-25 years.
He has an interesting answer that is worth reading.
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