I think you are confusing your wishes with reality.

It is in no way like insurance today, and never has been. It has always paid out independent of circumstance. It was never about equity either - The poor get less, and the very poorest get none. Again, this is the way it has been since conception.

It is a state mandated pension with low returns and a progressive fee. Noting more.

I think you misread. There's no "confusion of wishes with reality", we were explicitly discussing the not-reality that is wealthier people paying more and receiving less, and whether that is fair or just.

My analogy to insurance was more about whether you pay into "your" account with your name on it or if you pay into a big fund directly pays out to recipients, and nothing is held aside for you.

I see. I think there is a lot of baggage with the insurance analogy, like probability and conditional payout which are absent.

The money isnt held in a dedicated account with your name on it. However, how much you pay in is rigorously tracked and used to directly to determine how much you get.

The closest thing is a pension. Like a pension, SS pays out X% of your taxable salary. X is progressive with high earners heavily subsidizing low earners.

SS starts by paying out 90% of taxable salary in the lowest bracket. As income goes up, this reduces to paying out 15% in the top bracket. The brackets are referred to SS bend points.

> I think there is a lot of baggage with the insurance analogy, like probability and conditional payout which are absent.

I agree; it was a poor choice of analogy on my part.

The disability part of Social Security is very much like insurance…

So unemployment insurance should cost more if you earn more. What about health insurance? Car insurance? Starbucks latte? All goods and services? Would it not be just and fair if all prices were relative to income rather than absolute?

... you'll notice that taken to absurdity this is the same statement as "everyone should be paid the same". And that's been tried.

If your doctor told you to drink more water, would you drown yourself?

Taking things to absurdity is itself absurd.

Government programs are not the same as commercial products. I have no issue with unemployment or health insurance costing a percentage of one's income.

Let's also add fines and traffic tickets to the list of things that ought be more expensive as one becomes wealthier please.

Why not? California been trying to implement income based pricing for privately operated utilities like PG&E for years. It is already partially implemented for electricity.

It seems to me like government programs is a poor delineation, as government can pass a law to extend its own scope.

Why not groceries or clothes?

> Why not groceries or clothes?

Well, programs like TANF and SNAP exist, which I think are great and their greatest problems are they are not easy enough for people to make use of.

So, fair point, when looking at the most impoverished among us I do not think we should stop at governmental services.

TANF and SNAP are very different than what I am discussing. That are wealth transfers from general taxes to those in need. Very different than wanking into a public grocery store and seeing different prices based on your income.

Where I am, most grocery stores have two prices for items on the shelves. One "regular" price, and a second, lower price that only applies if one is paying with SNAP.

Feels like we're splitting hairs a bit here.

Maybe, I have never seen such dual prices. Are they state mandated?

I guess im still looking for some limiting principle. Why not just mandate that all goods are sold proportional to income.

What are you so afraid of?

That taken to an extreme, this idea is the same as "from everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their needs". Which sounds great, until you realize that this incentivizes needs and disincentivizes abilities.

Which really is just a manifestation of "when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric".

There are ways to disentangle the undesirable incentives. The Nordic countries in particular have done a great job of this.

Inability to work and create for my own benefit and that of my family. Collectivization and theft of my labor value.

Good idea!

It really is not. To see why not, imagine how you'd feel if you had a coworker who would come to work drunk (if they came at all). They would still be paid the same as you. Your only recourse would be to talk to this person as a "meeting of the peers", which they would proceed to ignore.

This was reality under the Soviet system, and was one of the main reasons it failed.

Now, I understand why I am getting all the cheeky responses and the downvotes. People are hurting. Capitalism in the US is currently failing under a different failure mode. The capitalists are relentless optimizers, even past the point where optimizing their metrics stops making sense. Their metric is "extract as much wealth from the populace as possible", and it's gotten to the point where the people are disillusioned, and very soon there will be nothing left to take.