Income Redistribution and Social Security

There is great potential and legitimacy for redistributing income to low-income families through social security (OASDI). The potentiality exists since the expenditures for the program are enormous compared with those for other income maintenance programs. The legitimacy for income redistribution can be argued based on the grounds that social security is not a private insurance program but a mechanism to transfer income from the working population to groups of people who are afflicted by risks identified under the law. Empirically speaking, there are several grounds to argue that the amount of transfer income through social security to the high-wage beneficiary family is probably greater than that to the low-wage beneficiary family. Having argued on the potential and legitimacy for income redistribution through social security, the article ends with several proposals on how to implement income redistribution through the program.