Republicans Eye Social Security Phase-out, Seek to Gut Earned Income Program

Republicans' Warrant to Destroy Security Security, SSA Trustees Are Trump Loyalists

Commentary

Scariest fourteen words in politics are: I'm from the Republican Party and I'm here to save Social Security and Medicare.

Republicans have for decades expressed desire to phase out Medicare and Social Security, and call it, entitlement reform, (Krugman, New York Times) (Krugman, New York Times).

Now, Republicans are squealing, again as they have for many years, they want to save Social Security. They call it reform again.

Writes Paul Krugman in June:

Whatever you may have heard, Social Security isn’t in danger of going bankrupt.

What we’re facing, instead, is potential political crisis. Congress and the White House could easily take action to sustain America’s retirement system. But given the current state of our politics, there’s no guarantee that they will. ... 

So don’t believe Republicans’ gaslighting that it will be necessary to cut Social Security benefits. All that is necessary to preserve Social Security is political will to raise taxes on the wealthy and a sensible immigration policy.

Today, "Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) call for Republicans to act on Social Security reform if they keep control of Congress in 2027 is getting pushback from Senate Republicans who warn it’s a bad political message heading into November."

"Yet, a trustees’ report that the popular retirement program will become insolvent sooner than expected has lit a fire under lawmakers in both parties to call for reforms such as raising the cap on payroll taxes, 'means testing' beneficiaries, raising the retirement age, and creating personal accounts to invest in the stock markets," reports Alexander Bolton.

First, the Social Security trustees are all Trump loyalists, extremists who will follow any and all of Trump's dictates.  

Trump and Republican-led Congress are intentionally trying to bleed and starve the Social Security Trust Funds, and then tell you they have no choice but to gut the most popular earned-income, social program in history.

It's like choking and starving someone to use a sick metaphor, and then declaring this person is unsustainable, insolvent and cannot live, so sorry.

From the Social Security Administration:

The Board of Trustees is comprised of four members who serve by virtue of their positions with the federal government: Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury and Managing Trustee; Frank J. Bisignano, Commissioner of Social Security; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services; and Keith E. Sonderling, Acting Secretary of Labor. The two public trustee positions are currently vacant.

Means testing means the government will investigate all of your assets and determine whether you get benefits from Social Security system that you paid into all of your life. 

Implementing means testing would usher in a radical, new attack on the Social Security system.

Republicans also advocate raising the retirement age before you can accept Social Security benefits.

Corporate media remains a hostile force against Social Security.

By law, Social Security has its own dedicated revenue streams (payroll taxes) and legally distinct trust funds from the U.S. Treasury. 

Any politician, such as Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (R) who says we need to cut Social Security benefits, which has funded the rest of government spending for decades, is lying.

"The argument being used to cut Social Security is that because we have a significant deficit problem and a $14 trillion national debt, [in 2011] we just can’t afford to maintain Social Security benefits. This argument is false. Social Security, because it is funded by the payroll tax, not the U.S. Treasury, has not contributed one nickel to our deficit," warned Bernie Sanders back in 2011. "In fact, according to a very recent study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Social Security has a $2.5 trillion dollar surplus and can pay out every penny owed to every eligible American for the next 27 years until 2038." 

As Paul Krugman noted in 2015, "[N]o, Social Security does not face a financial crisis; its long-term funding shortfall could easily be closed with modest increases in revenue." (New York Times)

But our money is looked upon as potential windfalls by predatory Wall Street, and the media corporations who do Wall Street's bidding, want our money, your money.

Republicans surveilling your money should frighten the hell out of you. 

I have no idea if Democrats are up to the challenge of stopping the Republicans.

Paul Ryan Eyes Social Security and Medicare for Destruction

Scott Walker, a ridiculous figure, teared up awed at the 2012
Republican Convention, listening to Paul Ryan speak.
Walker and Ryan share a cocoon, sheltered from reality.

One problem among many with Paul Ryan and Scott Walker is these life-long politicians living on public monies have never had a real job.

This adds to Ryan and Walker's lack of empathy for working families, as Ryan targets social earned insurance benefits, Medicare and Social Security.

Ryan and Walker have no connection to real people carving out a living, so they live in bubbles.

So we add a trillion to the debt with a tax cut for the wealthy, then we cut Medicare to pay for it. Wouldn’t it be simpler for seniors to just write a check to the Koch Brothers? https://t.co/nviAEJSntm

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) December 8, 2017

See also:

Paul Ryan, are you listening?

"Today’s tax cuts have no bipartisan support. They have no intellectual grounding, no body of supporting evidence.

The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational.”https://t.co/EJjNsgSsJz

— Stop the Speaker PAC (@StopTheSpeaker) December 8, 2017

Paul Ryan as House Speaker Would Destroy Social Security, Medicare

Republicans want to kill Social Security. The Democratic
Party nominee for the presidency all but guarantees victory
by standing up for Social Security against GOP attack, which
would be led by prospective House Speaker Paul Ryan.
- Image from August 15 Email from the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

Updated - Paul Ryan—Six Reasons Why He's Everything That’s Wrong With the GOP

"I cannot and will not give up my family time," demands Speaker-in-waiting Paul Ryan.

Too bad Ryan is not a supporter of expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act, and works avidly against working parents.

Other Americans want to spend time with their families as well.

"Ryan seeks to preserve his own balance between his work and his family, he’s pushed policies that would make doing so more difficult for others, particularly poor parents," notes Bryce Covert in ThinkProgress.

Ryan gets to take off from the office, courtesy of the tax payers, whenever he wants, so his demands ring a bit shrill. As does Ryan's war against Social Security and Medicare.

"Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and 'shareholder value' the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one. If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be 'forced' to make 'hard choices' - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked," wrote Mike Lofgren, who retired on June 17, 2011 after 28 years as a Republican Congressional staffer. (TruthOut)

Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House would launch an epic battle against Social Security and Medicare, citing the the long list of Republican lies.

Ryan's Congressional pension is already set, so why not, and Ryan rakes in a lot of campaign cash this way.

"Paul Ryan (R-Wis) rank[ed] first in the House with an estimated [campaign] net worth of $5,531,036 in 2013," notes Open Secrets.

No facts needed on policy from Paul Ryan and the Republicans (Krugman, New York Times) (Krugman, New York Times).

GOP arguments about urgency for action are still fallacious, kill Medicare and Social Security to save them, and stop allowing Americans who pay into Medicare and Social Security to become "dependent" (to quote Ryan) on their earned benefits from Medicare and Social Security.

As Paul Krugman notes last August, "[N]o, Social Security does not face a financial crisis; its long-term funding shortfall could easily be closed with modest increases in revenue," (New York Times).

Ryan like his friend, Scott Walker, does not like it when constituents publicly challenge him, no matter Ryan's obsession with phasing out Medicare and Social Security (Mal Contends).

Paul Ryan is lifelong politician, immediately becoming a GOP aide after college in 1992, and then serving in Congress beginning in 1999 (Ballotpedia), all health and pension benefits and salary paid by the American tax payers, and Paul Ryan is living large.

Democrat Who Stands Up for Social Security Wins the Presidency

Republicans still want to kill Social Security. The Democratic
Party nominee for the presidency all but guarantees victory
by standing up for Social Security against GOP attack.
- Image from August 15 Email from the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

Republican presidential candidates want to phase out Medicare and Social Security, and call it entitlement reform (Krugman, New York Times) (Krugman, New York Times).

Nothing new there, GOP arguments about urgency for action are still fallacious, kill Medicare and Social Security to save them.

As Paul Krugman notes this morning, "[N]o, Social Security does not face a financial crisis; its long-term funding shortfall could easily be closed with modest increases in revenue." (New York Times)

What is equally clear is that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders want to protect and expand Medicare and Social Security (Yahoo News), and this is a winning message, reinforcing every other issue message fighting for the working class of America against the One Percent who want to destroy Medicare and Social Security.

"The argument being used to cut Social Security is that because we have a significant deficit problem and a $14 trillion national debt, we just can’t afford to maintain Social Security benefits. This argument is false. Social Security, because it is funded by the payroll tax, not the U.S. Treasury, has not contributed on nickel to our deficit," warned Bernie Sanders back in 2011. "In fact, according to a very recent study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Social Security has a $2.5 trillion dollar surplus and can pay out every penny owed to every eligible American for the next 27 years until 2038."

Earned-income, social insurance programs that are the most successful in American history are threatened by Republicans who will not give up their decades-long effort to kill Medicare and Social Security because of their perverse ideology.

As Krugman, a Medicare and Social Security champion and debunker of Republican attempts to kill the programs, writes today:

The issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80 last week. The retirement program is, of course, both extremely popular and a long-term target of conservatives, who want to kill it precisely because its popularity helps legitimize government action in general. As the right-wing activist Stephen Moore (now chief economist of the Heritage Foundation) once declared, Social Security is 'the soft underbelly of the welfare state'; “jab your spear through that” and you can undermine the whole thing.

But that was a decade ago, during former President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize the program — and what Mr. Bush learned was that the underbelly wasn’t that soft after all. Despite the political momentum coming from the G.O.P.’s victory in the 2004 election, despite support from much of the media establishment, the assault on Social Security quickly crashed and burned. Voters, it turns out, like Social Security as it is, and don’t want it cut.

The same popularity in a healthy democracy would have all candidates of every party clamoring to protect Social Security from attack.

Yet Republicans—Walker, Ryan, Bush, Cruz, Paul and Rubio—won't back down. Neither should Clinton and Sanders.

Notes Krugman:

It’s remarkable, then, that most of the Republicans who would be president seem to be lining up for another round of punishment. In particular, they’ve been declaring that the retirement age — which has already been pushed up from 65 to 66, and is scheduled to rise to 67 — should go up even further.

Thus, Jeb Bush says that the retirement age should be pushed back to “68 or 70”. Scott Walker has echoed that position. Marco Rubio wants both to raise the retirement age and to cut benefits for higher-income seniors. Rand Paul wants to raise the retirement age to 70 and means-test benefits. Ted Cruz wants to revive the Bush privatization plan. 

Here are the facts of Social Security as noted by the National Priorities Project in one image:

Party of No Says No to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

The GOP project of purposefully running up the national debt, then decrying the debt as forcing the phase-out of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is proceeding apace.

Paul Ryan, GOP Now Say They Love Medicare

Remember, the Tea Partiers aren't too bright

If Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan and the GOP get their extremist war plans enacted to destroy Medicare, the popular social insurance program will end, as Gingrich promised would happen in 1995:

Now, we don't get rid of it in round one because we don't think that that's politically smart, and we don't think that's the right way to go through a transition. But we believe it's going to wither on the vine because we think people are voluntarily going to leave it -- voluntarily. (NYT)

Destroying Medicare would be political suicide for the Republican Party.

So, the new GOP line is to lie.

And the new GOP line on Medicare is in effect: Destroy Medicare, while pretending to save Medicare.

Writes Eugene Robinson:

[I]t was Democrats who conceived of Medicare, passed it into law and kept it viable all these years. It was Republicans who denounced the program as 'socialized medicine' — and who now want to replace Medicare’s guarantee with a system of vouchers.
Republicans may tell themselves that the GOP is the party of Medicare. But I doubt seniors will be convinced.

I doubt it too.

The 2012 Democratic Party convention will feature the credible message of protecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from the GOP-Tea Party.

And the GOP-Tea Party tries to convince America they just want to save these popular social insurance programs by their new-found love for them. Newt Gingrich says so, Mitt Romney says so and so does Paul Ryan, the whole bunch of GOP-Tea Partiers:

"The first step is to move the two programs away from their current unsustainable defined-benefit entitlement model to a fiscally sound defined-contribution model."

As Paul Krugman notes: "That means that instead of Medicare as we know it, which pays your medical bills, you’d get a lump sum which you can apply to private insurance — they’ll yell when we call it a voucher, but that’s what it is."

Let's hope the GOP keeps talking.

Paul Ryan, Romney and GOP: Phase out Social Security and Medicare

Money for GOP, not for thee

The 14 scariest words in American politics: 'We're from the Republican Party, and we're here to save Social Security and Medicare."

"If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be 'forced' to make 'hard choices' - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked."
- Mike Lofgren, who retired on June 17 after 28 years as a Republican Congressional staffer (TruthOut, Saturday September 3, 2012)

Lofgren is brilliant, but seeing what Ryan, Romney and the GOP are up to is like wondering if we were going to war with Iraq in January 2003—the decisions were made, and ideology and propaganda led the way to disaster.

The GOP has always hated the Medicare and Social Security, and now they want the presidency to save it, not to bury the social insurance program though their asserted reason—debt is the achieved objective of the Bush-Cheney administration and unregulated Wall Street speculators.

"Romney insisted on Wisconsin radio [last[ Friday that Ryan's plan does not balance the budget on the backs of the poor and the elderly ... It instead preserves Medicare and preserves Social Security." (The Paul Ryan Watch)

Reviews are not kind to these unpopular GOP positions, as noted by Xoff:

A Christian Science Monitor column by Howard Gleckman calls it Ryan's "mystery meat budget" saying he "airily promises both trillions of dollars in tax cuts and a nearly balanced budget within a decade, but never says how he’d get there."

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones says:

Paul Ryan has released the latest Republican budget, and it's a blizzard of numbers, gimmicks, weird comparisons, and obfuscation. It's no more serious than any of Ryan's other budget proposals, no matter how many PowerPoint slides he includes... 

Dana Milbank, in the Washington Post, says Ryan's idea is to help the poor by hurting them:

Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, is on record as saying, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” And Ryan has just written a budget that supports Romney’s boast.

In an editorial, the Post calls Ryan's plan "dangerous and intentionally vague."

The Post also says Democrats want to know how much taxpayer money was spent to produce those slick videos with Ryan to try to sell his budget.  So far, no one's saying.

Krugman Eviscerates Kill-Medicare Pols, Ryan and Lieberman

So desperate are Republicans to kill Medicare, they have threatened to crash the economy if Obama doesn't let them gut the popular program.

Now Joe Lieberman has chimed in.

Paul Krugman shines some needed light on the kill-Medicare debate.

Below is an excerpt with a link to the Medicare discussion at The Democratic Strategist.

Writes Krugman:

Every once in a while a politician comes up with an idea that's so bad, so wrongheaded, that you're almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails.

And so it was with Senator Joseph Lieberman's proposal, released last week, to raise the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

Like Republicans who want to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with (grossly inadequate) insurance vouchers, Mr. Lieberman describes his proposal as a way to save Medicare. It wouldn't actually do that. But more to the point, our goal shouldn't be to "save Medicare," whatever that means. It should be to ensure that Americans get the health care they need, at a cost the nation can afford.

... Medicare actually saves money -- a lot of money -- compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs.

The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn't Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009.

But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it's true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we'll be forcing them to get private insurance -- if they can -- that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare.

GOP CouponCare Tanking; Ryan and GOP Delusional

"Amazingly, despite the strongly negative reaction so far to the Ryan budget's plan to end Medicare as we know it, conservatives are continuing to back it, arguing that all they need is better messaging about the plan. This is clearly delusional. No message is going to change the simple fact that the public doesn't like the plan and wishes it would go away ... ."
- Ruy Teixeira, quoted in The Democratic Strategist