No, they shouldn't. SS is meant to prevent destitution, not enable luxury. Wealthy Americans owe the working and consumption classes whose sacrifices make their riches possible; there is no such obligation to ensure those elite earners get back even what they paid into that particular channel, at the expense of people who are much less well off, when they have other resources to draw from.
You might not think that's fair. I do. Even under this hypothetical regime, I know who I'd choose to be: rich and paying a ton in taxes, in a heartbeat.
Devils advocate: by subsidizing the “consumption class” you enable more consumption. I get that’s how our current economy works but there are probably a lot of negative externalities associated with increasing consumption.
That's fine. Sure, there are downsides that increase as consumption increases, meaning that overconsumption (however that's defined) is undesirable. However, consumption enables cultural expression that otherwise would be economically untenable. Art, design, music, etc. benefit from economic incentives to overproduce beyond subsistence. That people go above and beyond in their productive capacity in order to enable creators to create freely and contribute to the corpus of human expression is something that should be recognized as the sacrifice for the collective soul that it is.
That's a good point, and I'm in favor of those 'cultural expressions'. But I think we're fooling ourselves if we think somebody is buying a gas-guzzling SUV, or the next iPhone, so they will have the ability to write the next great American novel. I'd venture that most consumption is a status game.
I think my larger point is we have to zoom out for a systems level analysis. We shouldn't assume that the production is de-coupled from the consumption, and production can come with a host of negative externalities. I'm not convinced that wonton consumption (especially for the sake of itself) is a net positive, given human nature's tendency to be insatiable with regard to consumption.
>I'd venture that most consumption is a status game.
I would include the debasement of one's moral soul for social-climbing purposes in the set of aforementioned sacrifices. :)
In any case, I did mention the dangers of overconsumption. There is something in between that and subsistence that is a net-positive for society (in this epoch, at least).
You might not think that's fair. I do. Even under this hypothetical regime, I know who I'd choose to be: rich and paying a ton in taxes, in a heartbeat.