You are charged an income tax on what you pay into social security why should you be charged income tax again if you ever get any of it back?

Answer 1

We all want to live in a fantasyland where police, fire, roads, bridges, air traffic control, courts, national defense, education, etc are all taken care of and nobody has to pay for them (or at least, somebody else takes pays for it). But somebody has to pay for these things. And somebody has to make the hard decisions about how to raise the money. Nobody likes being asked for the money, nobody likes paying the money.

Congress was given the thankless job of deciding how to raise the money to pay for these things. They decided that after giving generous allowances to make sure low-income people were exempt, people whose income exceeded these allowances should be asked to pay some taxes based on how much income they had. Yes, they could have exempted Social Security benefits, they could have exempted a lot of other things. They could have imposed a head tax instead of an income tax. They could have imposed a sales tax. They could have lowered Social Security benefits instead of paying them to you and taking part back in taxes and you would never have known the difference.

But they decided to do it this way.