you sound scared
again, false assertions: Social Security is already funded through 2025; only in a looking-glass world can one assert that it also has a negative rate of return. Small increases in payroll tax and/or small changes in retirement age would fully fund SS. Deducting a fair share from those with large incomes would further support the fund.
If you preferred to rely on you 401K, or, instead, speculate in the stock market you would have lost fully half of your investment in the 2008 crash (or any one of the almost regular "bust" cycles that happen about once a decade). You wouldn't even recover your "nut" (I think we call that a "negative rate of return") for several years and, if you were so unfortunate to retire in 2009, or even this year, you'd be surviving on half your expected retirement.
I guess "redistribution" doesn't sound so bad in that case.
But you still have roads, maybe a few more potholes; but you're unwilling to take the personal effort, I suspect, in planning with your neighbors, nor let go of even a few more shekels, even if it benefitted you, to make things better. What, or who are you afraid of?
There's a contemporary story of Colorado Springs. Folks there voted down a tax increase, and the city couldn't afford keeping all the streetlights on, so they turned them off. Folks complained, but, without the $, the lights couldn't return. So quite a number convinced the city that they could pay to have their lights on their specific street turned on. Seems the actual cost was about twice what the tax increase would have been. But folks were glad to have government off their back. To me, it sounds more than a little foolhardy, and more than a little antisocial. Democracy doesn't work with people pitching in.
