Matthew Yglesias: "Social Security From The Ground Up"

Matthew Yglesias reimagines Social Security:

Say we didn't have Social Security or some equivalent program and you were a liberal trying to design some government programs to help out old people. What would you do?

One thing you would definitely do is put some kind of health care plan into place. It's unlikely that you would come up with the current Medicare system, since it treats prescription drugs so oddly and has other problems, but we'll just bracket that and call it 'Medicare.' What else would you do? What you almost certainly wouldn't do is create a huge intergenerational wealth transfer scheme funded by a very high and regressive tax that pays out money according to a formula whose mild progressivity is undermined by the way it favors the (predominantly wealthy) long lived over the (predominantly poor) short lived.

Instead, you would want to put in place some kind of 'welfare for old people' such that a citizen who has worked hard all of his or her life and now is too old to work can live out the remainder of his or her days in dignity.

Such a program would be like Social Security in many respects -- pay-as-you-go financing out of current tax receipts and based around guaranteed monthly checks. But instead of the benefit level being calculated based on how much you used to pay in taxes when you were working, it would be based around how poor you are. The poorest people would get the most generous checks, and it would phase down so that well-off people weren't getting any public assistance.