Pay me now, pay me later, pass the donut

One of the good debates about Social Security is whether the 12.4 percent tax, half credited to the employee and half to the employer, is really just 12.4 percent on the employee. I don't see how it can be otherwise, but there are arguments: elasticities determine how much of a price increase is borne by the producer and how much by the consumer.

Stanford researchers have published a paper raising a similar concept. As prior research indicates, fat people earn less in wages than others. However, the paper finds this is because they receive more pay in the form of higher health care costs covered by their employer. To reach the conclusion, they had to do some tricky analysis, showing a pay differential for health care, but not for other benefits the cost of which they believed was unrelated to weight, such as retirement plans. (Maybe there'd be no difference for 401K's, but wouldn't you expect fat people to die earlier than others, and therefore cost less in defined benefits retirement plans? Wouldn't they then be expected to earn more in wages for that reason? God love economics and studies.)