Skaltezon, wealth =/= income. Further, not all income is taxed the same.
Quote:
|
The median net worth of households headed by someone 65 or older was $170,494. That is 42 percent more than in 1984, when the Census Bureau first began measuring such data broken down by age. The median net worth for the younger-age households was $3,662, down by 68 percent from a quarter-century ago, according to the Pew analysis.
|
Quote:
|
Social Security benefits account for 55 percent of the annual income for older-age households, unchanged since 1984. The retirement benefits, which are indexed for inflation, have been a consistent source of income even as safety-net benefits for other groups such as low-income students have failed to keep up with rising costs. The congressional supercommittee that is proposing cuts has been reviewing whether to trim college aid programs, such as by restricting eligibility or charging students interest on loans while they are still in school.
|
LINK
In other words, the elderly tend to be more wealthy than the young. Further, because (1) social security is partially tax exempt (as stated in the prior Economist article), and (2) because the income tax is more severe on income derived from working as opposed to certain types of investment, their income tax rate can be lower as well.
LINK
...not only do the elderly tend to be the wealthier the young, have a preferential tax rate, they are the single largest recipients of the two largest entitlement programs in the USA (Medicare [$485b] & Social Security [$761b]).
This behavior is called
Rent Seeking (link), and it is a great example of the problem of “redistributing wealth” via the government – the wealth does get redistributed, and the overwhelming tendency is for it to go from poor to the rich.