How much income will each working american have to make to support each Social Security recipient?

You’re not specifying a time frame for this statistic, so I’m going to answer based on the latest figures I’ve found, which are for 2007:

Total Social Security expenditures for 2007= apx $600 billion

Number of non-farm employees= apx 138 million

So if that $600 billion were spread equally (which of course it isn’t), each worker would pay about $4,300 over the year.

That picture will change rapidly over the coming years, of course, but that’s the current status.

That is also assuming that all the money for Social Security comes directly from the taxpayer, which it doesn’t. The tax income is invested in the Social Security Trust, much of which is invested in U.S. Treasury bonds. While those don’t make a whole lot of interest, at least they’re not losing money the way a lot of other investments are nowadays. As of September, there was $2.3 trillion in the Social Security trust fund.

In the best possible scenario, though, the interest from the Trust fund’s investment is paid out as Social Security, making the figure that each worker must contribute a little murkier than a straight math equation would imply.