> (It's a very good deal as a W-2 employee with someone else paying the employer half, though.)
I agree with everything you say here, except this last sentence.
It would be true if the money were coming from a truly external source, but from an economic perspective, this is no different from a "normal" sales or income tax. As a result, it doesn't matter who is nominally paying it - the "real" payer (the incidence of the tax) depends on the relative elasticity of the supply and demand.
As it turns out, empirically, about 95% of the incidence of FICA (if I remember correctly) falls on the employee. In other words, it doesn't matter if the employer is nominally paying for half - they factored that in already when deciding how much to offer the employee when they hired him or her.
For many people reading this thread, Social Security is a bad deal no matter how you look at it - for many people reading this, it will be literally impossible to earn as much back from Social Security as they have paid in (assuming a vaguely realistic life expectancy).
(This is not a political statement, by the way - whether or not one believes that Social Security is good or bad depends on how much value one places on transferring a bit of wealth in order to guarantee a minimum income for the elderly. I just wanted to point out a part of the Social Security calculus that is easy to overlook.)
I agree with everything you say here, except this last sentence.
It would be true if the money were coming from a truly external source, but from an economic perspective, this is no different from a "normal" sales or income tax. As a result, it doesn't matter who is nominally paying it - the "real" payer (the incidence of the tax) depends on the relative elasticity of the supply and demand.
As it turns out, empirically, about 95% of the incidence of FICA (if I remember correctly) falls on the employee. In other words, it doesn't matter if the employer is nominally paying for half - they factored that in already when deciding how much to offer the employee when they hired him or her.
For many people reading this thread, Social Security is a bad deal no matter how you look at it - for many people reading this, it will be literally impossible to earn as much back from Social Security as they have paid in (assuming a vaguely realistic life expectancy).
(This is not a political statement, by the way - whether or not one believes that Social Security is good or bad depends on how much value one places on transferring a bit of wealth in order to guarantee a minimum income for the elderly. I just wanted to point out a part of the Social Security calculus that is easy to overlook.)