[jandrewrogers]

The reason there is a maximum on Social Security contributions and no means testing is that it is strongly marketed politically as a universal retirement account. Many of the system's characteristic are designed to ensure this perception. You receive Social Security roughly proportional to your contribution. This positioning is very important to the political support because there is the pretense of having earned it.

If you remove the cap on contribution and/or means test the receipt then that pretense is gone. Politically, it becomes explicitly a welfare system for people that did not save for retirement and penalizes those that do save. Once Social Security is perceived as "unearned" it becomes an acceptable target for reduction or elimination to the population at large.

Social Security is in fact a welfare tax and no one is entitled to receive it (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemming_v._Nestor) but its political viability is dependent on the popular perception to the contrary.

[dragonwriter]

> You receive Social Security roughly proportional to your contribution.

Well, its a monotonically increasing function of your contributions, but its not proportional to them, because of the bend points.

> If you remove the cap on contribution and/or means test the receipt then that pretense is gone.

Means testing might arguably do that in theory (except that it empirically doesn't in practice, as SS is, in fact, already means-tested via the rules for taxability), but how does removing the contribution cap so long as further contributions above the old cap still contribute to the benefit calculation?

[ForHackernews]

People are dumb and don't pay close attention. I say raise the contribution cap, but don't means test it. That way everyone is still "paying in" and "getting back" the way they are now, but the extraordinarily wealthy will pay in much more than they receive. The average voter will continue to see SS as something "earned" rather than the entitlement program it [already] is.