Really? Cato? Here is what cornell had to say about Helvering, which was an attempt to establish a "shareholder" right for someone who had paid into SS.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/socsec/course/readings/301us619.htm
Nestor was more about the right of the government to punish someone who'd been a communist than anything else.
The verbiage declaring that it was not the analogy of an annuity simply had to do with ensuring the government had flexibility in paying benefits....otherwise a myriad of lawsuits would have arisen claiming survivors benefits for distant relatives or siblings....payments for creditors...
It doesn't say that it is welfare in any of the documents I looked at.
Well, Helvering "legitimizes" the con-job that is the Social Security System. No, you have no right to the payments, Congress cna changer or modify them at will. And originally we were guarnateed that SS would cost no more than 1 percent of anyone's salary, and that the payments (because they were insurance payments and not income -- they were income that had already come in) would never be taxed.
Now, of course, the SS premium in FICA is 6.2 percent of income under $150K and of course your benefit payment is taxed -- and the system is still going broke. Yay, soft socialism.
But the key line in Helvering is here, "Yet difficulties are left when the power is conceded. The line must still be drawn between one welfare and another, between particular and general. Where this shall be placed cannot be known through a formula in advance of the event. There is a middle ground, or certainly a penumbra, in which discretion is at large. The discretion, however, is not confided to the courts. The discretion belongs to Congress, unless the choice is clearly wrong, a display of arbitrary power, not an exercise of judgment."
Congress can simply ask itself if something benefits the "general welfare," and respond to itself "yes," and do whatever it wants. Hence the modern alphabet soup of bureaucracy, under the aegis of the general welfare.
