Social Security and Income Redistribution

This New York Times Op-Ed talks about some points that Honest Partisan made in the comments to this post of mine:

Social Security has an image as a progressive program because low-income workers get back bigger monthly checks, relative to their salaries, than high-income workers do. They're also more likely to get disability benefits. But they lose out in other ways. They tend to start working and paying taxes at a relatively young age because they don't go to college, but then end up collecting benefits for fewer years because their life expectancy is shorter. They're more likely to be unmarried, making them ineligible for benefits earned by a spouse. 'The amount of income-related redistribution in Social Security is a lot less than people think,' said Jeffrey Liebman, a Harvard economist and a former official in the Clinton administration. 'If you get the details right, you can design a personal-account retirement system in which groups with high risks of poverty in old age come out at least as well as with the current system.' So why are his fellow Democrats so dead set against it? Their usual answer has been that any move to privatization would doom the poor along with the whole Social Security program. If you let the middle and upper classes opt out and finance their own retirement, the argument has gone, there will be no political support for even the modest subsidies that Social Security now provides to low-income workers - just look at what Republicans did to welfare and public housing programs. But the elderly poor are different from the younger poor. For one thing, they're more likely to vote, a fact not lost on even the most hardhearted Republican. They also arouse much more public sympathy. Kicking 25-year-olds off welfare was popular because it was thought to be good for them. Nobody claims that forcing that widow to eat cat food will build character.

I think that Social Security does a terrible job as a vehicle for saving for retirement and only a mediocre job as income security for poor people. I think we can, with a smarter program, do better on both accounts. I am fairly libertarian minded, and thus opposed to most income redistribution schemes, however, I think that we, as a society, should provide for poor people who cannot work. If I think this, then I am pretty sure that the fears liberals have that if Social Secuity is reformed voters will stop supporting it and it will disappear leaving our elderly to starve are unfounded. Most people, and an even larger percentage of voters, are not going to let old people starve. If anything, with things like the prescription drug benefit, the trend is in the other direction. So we should at least try to make a better retirement program, and not simply try to patch up the one we have because of fears that a new system will leave old people out in the cold.