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The fact that the pension is sitting in the bank account of someone other than the recipient is just a paperwork issue. It should be treated the same as if it was sitting in the bank account of the recipient. Taking it is equivalent to taxing the old on savings. You may wish to tax the old on savings anyway, but admit that that's what you're doing.
Except they aren't savings. It's not like the money they contributed was put into a fund somewhere to accrue interest and now they are getting it back. Their money was spent to pay out pensions to the old before, and their current pensions are being paid by current contributions from the young, with no relationship between how much they contributed and how much they get paid back out (pensions pay out much more than was ever paid into them and were only ever possible because of an exponentially increasing population of young people to fund them; when fertility collapsed, the pensions became unsustainable).
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No, that's not how it works at all.
A state pension means that the government is taking from taxpayers and paying the old.
Pensions are provided because the old don't have savings (or because they don't have 'enough' savings, after they've fiddled the figures to ensure they don't).
I have no problem with people saving their own money, my issue is with the government subsidizing the lifestyle of the old at the expense of the young. Welfare /= savings.
A "pension" in the US is deferred compensation, generally the term implies a defined benefits plan. Once you've been employed for the requisite period, the employer (whether public or private) is obliged to make the payments when you get old. At a cash accounting level this is the same as taking from the taxpayers and paying the old, but it's a matter of paying a debt owed, not a subsidy.
This is complicated by the way some of the public pensions were attained -- union delivers votes to politicians in exchange for pension benefits -- which taints the process, but barring things like that, a pension is an obligation owed the former employee.
In most other Anglophone countries what the US calls "social security" is called a "pension".
Good definitional clarification, I understand where Jiro was coming from now, not being American myself.
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