Is social security part of the social safety net

Executive Summary Building on the existing literature that examines the extent of redistribution in the Social Security system as a whole, this paper focuses more specifically on how Social Security affects the poor. This question is important because a social security program that reduces overall inequality by redistributing from high‐income individuals to middle‐income individuals may do nothing to help the poor; conversely, a program that redistributes to the poor may nonetheless be regressive according to broader measures if it also redistributes from middle‐ to upper‐income households. We have four major findings. First, as we expand the definition of income to use more comprehensive measures of well‐being, we find that Social Security becomes less progressive. Indeed, when we use an “endowment” defined by potential labor earnings at the household level rather than actual earnings at the individual level, we find that Social Security has virtually no effect on overall inequality. Second, we find that...