Joho the Blog
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I'm not sure this question makes any sense. The benefit correlates with the contributions that you made into the system, and a pattern of your x best or x most-recent years (I don't recall which). Also, it matters how much time you had as a contributor into the system.

The benefit rate is determined by the situation at the time and various tables and actuarial analyses that apply for the people who are receiving benefits. Not for when they were paying into the system. (There's an overlap, but they are loosely coupled.)

More to the point, the taxes are based on earned income and, except for the self-employed, are matched by slightly larger amounts on the employer side. For the self-employed, the rate is higher but not quite the same as the employee+employer rate. The cap is on how much of your earned income is subject to the tax.
One of the weird things about the system is that the Social Security Administration doesn't report what your contributions have been over the years, but what the income was that the contribution was based on each year. If you max out (and the limit keeps increasing) they'll stop there.

Now, since the taxes are on earned income, people with very high incomes tend to have deferred income and other arrangements, as well as investments and such. These devices (by people who probably have little future need for the benefit and certainly aren't expecting to live on it) mean that you might not see much improvement. Finally, increasing the contributions of high earners is probably not going to be returned to them in proportion. The funds aren't earmarked after all, although it would certainly shore up the trust-fund aspect until the Congress saw an opportunity to spend it down (like our unmaterialized tax surplus of recent times) by increasing benefits (or reducing the tax) in some way.

So, quickly grabbing a self-employment tax return out of my file drawer, I see that for tax year 2002, the tax rate was 15.3% up to net income of $84,900. Above that figure, with its tax of $10,527.60, additional net income is taxed at 2.9%.

Disclosure: I receive Social Security Benefits now. In addition, further taxes that I pay into the system will lead to small increases in benefits based on the contribution->benefits tables that apply for my age cohort.

Welcome back. I told Vicki that you were in Italy and she didn't leave me for the next flight to Italy after all. I think it was close though. You should envy yourself. [;<).

Seen Krugman's latest column in the NY Times re: this issue .. ?

Very clear, cuts to the heart of the matter.

Afterthought. Yes, the benefits are capped (assuming preservation of today's model), because your credit is based on the earned-income that Social Security taxes were collected on. If there was no cap then high earners would have a higher amount than the current cut-offs above which the tax is not paid. But there is still some place where that stops every year.

I really don't think this has much to do with the problem of the trust fund being spent down in future years, when benefit pay-outs exceed *new* arriving contributions from non-retired earners.

If that's all it would take, though, the alleged danger being faced is more like a speed bump. But we already know that, don't we? The rest is ideological positioning and the new meme that our old folks are free-loading on young wage earners. (See the Becker-Posner stuff on this.)

Ah, generational warfare. What a self-correcting concept.