>Consider: young people would be taking care of old people even without social security. Social Security, in a sense, just brings those transfer payments onto the federal ledger.
It does more than that. It makes the payments unconditional and divorced from family. If someone's children are paying for their retirement, they're more likely to stay in close contact because of the continuing dependency. The grandparents are more likely to live in closer proximity to their children and grandchildren and impart their wisdom rather than moving to Florida to play shuffleboard on cruise ships. Parents who know they'll have to depend on their children in their retirement have a greater incentive to care about the success of their progeny, etc.
And that's assuming the payments go to the same people as they would under a state program or with voluntary individual action. Social security is very poorly implemented: The richest taxpayers pay the lowest percentage of their salaries in social security tax and then receive the highest benefits. Millionaires living in mansions receive larger social security checks than retired Walmart greeters living in hovels.
Moving things to the state level gives us an opportunity to rethink all this. Stop sending Warren Buffet a social security check and instead have him pay to subsidize living expenses for the retired working poor based on need. Let middle class families with successful middle class children handle their own affairs internally rather than having the government use force to take from the son to give to the father.
And let me ask this: If transfer payments did nothing and had no economic effect, what would be the argument for keeping them? If they have no effect then keeping them is just wasting resources on government bureaucracy to redistribute the money pursuant to the broken window fallacy.
You're bringing unrelated issues into the discussion. The point isn't that transfer payments have zero impact. The point is that transfer payments have less of an economic impact than than, say, using the money to blow up things in Iraq. So just looking at federal spending as a whole isn't a great way to measure the economic impact of government--you have to dig down and see where the money is going.
Another way to look at it is: consider two governments, both spend 30% of GDP. The first spends 25% on bureaucracy and the military, and 5% on transfer payments, while the second spends 10% of bureaucracy and the military, and 15% of transfer payments. Which government probably has a lower economic impact? Which government probably has more "fat" to trim?
It does more than that. It makes the payments unconditional and divorced from family. If someone's children are paying for their retirement, they're more likely to stay in close contact because of the continuing dependency. The grandparents are more likely to live in closer proximity to their children and grandchildren and impart their wisdom rather than moving to Florida to play shuffleboard on cruise ships. Parents who know they'll have to depend on their children in their retirement have a greater incentive to care about the success of their progeny, etc.
And that's assuming the payments go to the same people as they would under a state program or with voluntary individual action. Social security is very poorly implemented: The richest taxpayers pay the lowest percentage of their salaries in social security tax and then receive the highest benefits. Millionaires living in mansions receive larger social security checks than retired Walmart greeters living in hovels.
Moving things to the state level gives us an opportunity to rethink all this. Stop sending Warren Buffet a social security check and instead have him pay to subsidize living expenses for the retired working poor based on need. Let middle class families with successful middle class children handle their own affairs internally rather than having the government use force to take from the son to give to the father.
And let me ask this: If transfer payments did nothing and had no economic effect, what would be the argument for keeping them? If they have no effect then keeping them is just wasting resources on government bureaucracy to redistribute the money pursuant to the broken window fallacy.