TY - JOUR AU - Brown,Jeffrey R. AU - Coronado,Julia Lynn AU - Fullerton,Don TI - Is Social Security Part of the Social Safety Net? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15070 PY - 2009 Y2 - June 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15070 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15070.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Jeffrey Brown Department of Finance University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 515 East Gregory Drive Champaign, IL 61820 Tel: 217/333-3322 E-Mail: brownjr@illinois.edu Julia Lynn Coronado BNP Paribas E-Mail: corolynn@gmail.com Don Fullerton Department of Finance University of Illinois BIF Box#30 (MC520) 515 East Gregory Drive Champaign, IL 61820 Tel: 217/244-3621 Fax: 217/244-3102 E-Mail: dfullert@illinois.edu M1 - published as Jeffrey R. Brown, Julia Lynn Coronado, Don Fullerton. "Is Social Security Part of the Social Safety Net? ," in Jeffrey R. Brown and James M. Poterba, editors, "Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 23" University of Chicago Press (2009) M3 - presented at "Tax Policy & the Economy", September 25, 2008 AB - 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 this result is driven largely by the lack of redistribution across the middle and upper part of the income distribution, so it masks some small positive net transfers to those at the bottom of the lifetime income distribution. Third, in cases where redistribution does occur, we find it is not efficiently targeted: many high income households receive positive net transfers, while many low income households pay net taxes. Finally, the redistributive effects of Social Security change over time, and these changes depend on the income concept used to classify someone as "poor". ER -