High-Income Married Couples Can Get $117,000 a Year In Social Security Benefits: What the Hell!

 Our politicians and federal apparatchiks say they care about the poor and despise the rich. 

Nevertheless, I notice that our government gives out a lot of dough to rich people who don’t need federal handouts. For example, the Cato Institute reported yesterday that high-income married couples receive as much as $117,000 a year in Social Security benefits. Quoting Forbes writer Andrew Biggs, the Cato report points out:

[America’s Social Security program] produces . . . unnecessarily generous benefits for the highest earners, who easily could save more for retirement on their own, while shortchanging the Americans most at risk of poverty in old age because they received low pay during their working years.

This is outrageous when we consider that the average Social Security check is less than $ 1,800 and that 40 percent of older Americans depend almost solely on their Social Security checks to fund their retirement.

 

Put another way, Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi will get bigger Social Security checks than a Mississippi school teacher or some guy who worked all his life as an attendant in a nursing home.

Cato recommends that the U.S. follow Great Britain’s example and pay a flat-rate benefit to everyone—causing benefits to rise for low-income earners and shrink for the rich.

 

Britons receive about $34,000 in retirement benefits—regardless of lifetime earnings. If the U.S. switched to the British model, millions of low-income Americans would have a more comfortable retirement, and our Social Security program costs would decrease.

 

There's just one drawback: the British model for government retirement pensions would piss off  American rich people. And that's something Congress would never do.

 

Does Nancy need a big Social Security check?