I haven't conflated them, it's just that it's required that you misunderstand in order to continue on with the fiction that the youth owe you the money you paid into our elders. That doesn't make any sense. Your premise that you're getting back what you paid in only makes sense if you look at it that you actually paid something into the people paying you, which in practice is the investment in the youth becoming productive. Which you definitely do, just on average non-parents do not do it as much as parents.

It just does not make any sense whatsoever non-parents would get the same stake in SS that parents do. It makes 0 sense at all, as the system is currently set up, and I suspect is responsible for a large part of the moral hazard where people grab SS made possible by investment in children but reject children, basicaly renegging the investment but grabbing the dividends. This is part of the reason why I think SS is a broken system, and as we are finding out is likely destined for bankruptcy as the population pyramid inverts.

You still haven’t explained how you made this leap from elders to parents. That’s not the same thing. Social security benefits are based on how much you pay in, not how many children you have.

Because it's not just parents that raise children, it's our elders. You're paying property taxes to raise the children. You are contributing to society in ways that aid children. To the extent that your logic holds, you definitely do not deserve nothing. When you pay SS up to the elders you are in effect paying dividends on the investment they made in you, finally paying back into what they spent on you. The paying back happens when you pay SS, that's you settling the reciprocal arrangement. It makes no sense the youth (or if you insist, other people's children) would owe you for settling the reciprocation to your own elders.

My stance has and remains that the payoff from children, if it is to be violently enforced at the hand of the taxman as it is now, should be proportional to the investment, there is no reason to restrict that to just parents, it just happens to be that parents generally make the lions share of the investment.

>You still haven’t explained how you made this leap from elders to parents

It's a leap to refer to social security benefits as paid to (at least on average by far) our elders? .

> When you pay SS up to the elders you are in effect paying dividends on the investment they made in you

That’s not how Social Security works. The current Social Security beneficiaries made contributions to their seniors, not to me (their junior).

>That’s not how Social Security works

And thus you understand. That's my whole point! That is my objection! But to be clear I didn't say that's how SS works, I said that's how the reciprocation works -- I did not say that's when you pay back the SS money elders paid you (they didnt) but rather their investment. I clearly explained SS flows upward.

The flow of investment in the youth is largely from private individuals to youth. [privatized]

But the flow (dividends) the other way is largely through SS upwards. [socialized]

That's my whole point! It's a terrible system because the reciprocation encourages free-riders and poor incentives for investment in the youth, as the ROI is poorly coupled to those making the investment.

> I think you're looking at this with a misunderstanding of how SS works.

You accused me of not understanding how Social Security works, not of how you think it should work.

>You lost me here. I don’t have children but I pay into Social Security. Why shouldn’t I get something back in retirement?

Because you seem to think you're owed something 'back' when in fact the people you're asking something 'back' weren't people that you paid SS to.

What's more accurate is that SS is you paying the elderly back for their investment, not that you somehow create a debt for the children because you paid SS to the elderly. Your position there made zero sense.

Any debt you think you're owed 'back' from children who will pay you SS would be created when the children actually received something from you -- i.e. being raised, schooled, etc. Not created because you paid a 3rd party.