GOP will cut Social Security and make Trump Tax Cuts permanent

[billy backstay]

Heather seems to garner little interest and few viewers in her dedicated thread, but this topic is critical to our futures.

Do all of you that have paid into social security all of your working lives wish to see it curtailed? If could very well happen, if the GOP control both houses.

October 18, 2022​

Heather Cox Richardson
5 hr ago

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-18-2022/comments
In their year and a half in power, Democrats have put in place policies that are widely popular—indeed, the infrastructure projects provided for under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act are so popular that Republicans who voted against the law are nonetheless taking credit for them. Voters have long called for Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies (83% in favor), now made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act, which also caps certain drug expenses, including the cost of insulin. Between 80 and 90% of Americans want basic gun control laws—the Democrats just passed the first one in decades—and a majority want funding for action against climate change (65%) and relief for educational debt (55%).

Support for supplying Ukraine against Russia stands at 73%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken in early October. Support for Ukraine was a bipartisan commitment that changed only after Trump had the 2016 Republican platform, which had expressed support for Ukraine, watered down.

What has not been popular in the past year and a half, in fact, what has been quite unpopular, is the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. About 62% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while only 8% believe it should be illegal in all cases, and 28% believe it should be illegal in most cases.

Since June, when the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision, the news has reported multiple cases of raped children unable to obtain abortions in their home states, girls and women unable to obtain medications to treat long-term illnesses because those drugs can also induce abortion, women diagnosed with cancer who cannot get treatment, women whose fetuses have conditions incompatible with life and who cannot terminate the pregnancy, and women whose health is at risk as they are unable to obtain the healthcare they need as they are miscarrying—all of this just as abortion rights advocates warned would happen if the court overturned Roe v. Wade. Since the Dobbs decision, Democrats have outperformed expectations in four special House elections and one state referendum.

The popularity of the Democrats’ agenda and the unpopularity of their own appear to have pushed the Republicans to go for broke, courting their base by demanding the utter destruction of Democrats’ policies and the reinstatement of their own.

Since the 1980s, Republican leaders have embraced the idea that cutting taxes and concentrating wealth at the top of the economy will spark economic growth, although “supply side” economics has never produced as promised. They insist the programs Biden and the Democrats back are “socialism,” and their base agrees. Their base also hates abortion rights.

To sidestep the gulf between their base and the majority of voters, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) declined to announce any sort of an agenda before the midterm elections, telling donors that party leaders would just attack the Democrats.

There have been signs, though, of what the Republicans will do if they regain control of one or both of the houses of Congress, and top of the list was cutting the programs at the heart of our social welfare system: Social Security and Medicare. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) called for sunsetting all laws every five years and repassing them; Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) called for making Social Security and Medicare part of the discretionary budget, meaning their funding would have to be reapproved every year.

Republicans have also said they would pass a law to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations permanent, a move economists say would increase inflation. “The trick is to put the president in a position of either getting defeated in 2024 or signing your stuff into law,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich told Jeff Stein of the Washington Post. “Republicans will make it a priority to continue the Trump tax cuts, because it puts the Democrats in a position of being for tax increases and against economic growth.”

Recently, though, Republicans have been much clearer, warning that they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling in order to force Biden to agree to their demands to “reform” Social Security and Medicare by raising the age of eligibility and means testing. (Democrats have said they would stabilize the programs with higher taxes on the wealthy.)

This is a huge deal. While Trump has urged MAGA Republicans in the past to use the threat of the debt ceiling to get concessions, responsible Republicans have refused to play chicken with the global financial markets and with our own financial future, for defaulting even for a matter of hours will wash away our financial might. Raising the debt ceiling is not a future blank check, it enables the U.S. to meet bills it has already incurred, and refusing to do so will throw the U.S. into a catastrophic default. Congress has raised the debt ceiling repeatedly in the past forty years, but Republicans have apparently come around to Trump’s position that playing to their base is worth taking the U.S. hostage.

Republicans are also signaling a change in U.S. support for Ukraine. Although current Republican leaders have supported aid to Ukraine, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) suggested today that if the Republicans regain the majority thanks to more MAGA candidates, they will oppose giving more aid to Ukraine in the war with Russia. Putin has just launched the largest wave of airstrikes against Ukraine since the early days of the war, hitting civilian areas with the plan to cut off gas and electricity before the winter.

And, of course, after the Supreme Court justified striking down Roe v. Wade by saying abortion should be a state decision, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced a bill to ban abortion nationally. (Today, Biden pledged to push a law protecting abortion rights if voters return the few more lawmakers Democrats need to accomplish that.)

Republicans have sold their unpopular program in part by maintaining a narrative vision of the world that tells MAGA supporters what they want to hear. Since the beginning of Trump’s term, a key part of that narrative has been that the FBI investigation of the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives was a witch hunt. In April 2019, Trump's attorney general William Barr tapped U.S. attorney John Durham to discredit that investigation.

Journalist and professor Bill Grueskin collected the headlines from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page for the past year. They read: “Durham Cracks the Russia Case,” “Durham Delivers on Russiagate,” “John Durham Shows How the FBI Lets Its Informants Mislead It,” and so on.

But that’s not how it panned out. Durham ultimately indicted three men. One pleaded guilty to altering an email in a different case; he got probation. Durham accused another of lying to the FBI; a jury acquitted him. Durham indicted a third, Igor Danchenko, for lying to the FBI; today a jury acquitted him as well. Durham used the trial to rail against the FBI, but his inability to win a conviction after more than three years of work undermines the MAGA narrative that Durham was going to find the goods to pin a witch hunt on bad FBI agents and acquit Trump once and for all.

A new audiobook from veteran journalist Bob Woodward tore down another MAGA story today when it revealed an audiotape of Trump calling the letters he wrote to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “top secret” in January 2021. Clearly, he knew they were classified, despite his claims now that he didn’t take anything special. Further, he let Woodward see and transcribe the classified documents.

Will the puncturing of these narratives matter? At some level, no; they are about mythmaking and social identity. Today, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) celebrated her visit to the Wilder Monument at the Chickamauga (she misspelled it) battlefield in Georgia. She identified the monument as honoring Confederate soldiers and boasted that she “will always defend our nation’s history.” But, in fact, the Wilder Brigade, also known as the Lightning Brigade, was not Confederate; it was from the United States.

The point, though, was likely not accuracy: it was to “own” the “Libs” by celebrating the Confederacy.

Will reinforcing that identity for the Republican base be enough for the party to win the midterms? It’s anyone’s guess. But today, the first day of early voting in Georgia smashed the state’s previous record for first-day votes cast in a midterm election. In 2018 the first day of voting brought in 71,000 voters. Today that number hit more than 130,000.
—
Notes:
https://thehill.com/changing-americ...-support-student-loan-forgiveness-poll-finds/
https://www.reuters.com/world/europ...t-ukraine-despite-russian-threats-2022-10-05/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...a-better-than-expected-midterm-for-democrats/
https://www.healthcarefinancenews.c...ant-medicare-negotiate-drug-prices-poll-finds
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23141651/gun-control-american-approval-polling
https://www.pewresearch.org/politic...preme-courts-decision-to-overturn-roe-v-wade/
https://www.pewresearch.org/science...s-think-government-should-do-more-on-climate/
https://www.axios.com/2021/12/03/mcconnell-no-agenda-midterms
https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022...-minors-who-were-raped-denied-ohio-abortions/
https://www.wispolitics.com/2022/jo...care-part-of-the-discretionary-budget-process
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/10/17/republicans-tax-trump-biden/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/scalise-mccarthy-medicare-social-security-debt-ceiling
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/house-republicans-ukraine-mccarthy/
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/13/grahams-abortion-ban-senate-gop-00056423
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blo...sia-aims-to-freeze-ukrainians-into-surrender/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/us/politics/biden-abortion-midterms.html
https://www.mediamatters.org/abc/su...trophic-debt-crisis-order-cut-social-security
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/...on-all-counts-in-durham-russia-probe-00062380
https://apnews.com/article/election...es-elections-ae0275b4eb23981c1e6fbf9fc49c3239
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/26/law...-social-security-how-benefits-may-change.html

Bill Grueskin @BGrueskin
Today: Durham loses Danchenko case. May 2022: Durham loses Sussman case. Past year on the WSJ edit page: ⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/YyB4KubMnR




8:45 PM ∙ Oct 18, 2022

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2,994Likes920Retweets
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/trump-kim-woodward-top-secret/
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/vo...ly-voting-georgia/6CJLOFBOKFG3DPDSC2FTZQ73WY/

 

[Bus Driver]

Regarding those tax cuts -

3 myths about the Trump tax cuts​

The TCJA paid for itself.

The tax cuts boosted growth.

The tax cuts boosted employment.

 

[Steam Flyer]

... ... Past year on the WSJ edit page: ⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/YyB4KubMnR




8:45 PM ∙ Oct 18, 2022

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One thing that explains Republican success is their growing lock on media. The WSJ is an example, it was always conservative but the upper-crusty type conservative that looks down it's nose at far-right bullshittery. Now it's gone MAGA whackoe bullshit-spew. I dropped my subscription about 5 years ago because the actual financial/business news it contains is available elsewhere, and the RWNJ content just kept increasing.

 

[Raz'r]

One thing that explains Republican success is their growing lock on media. The WSJ is an example, it was always conservative but the upper-crusty type conservative that looks down it's nose at far-right bullshittery. Now it's gone MAGA whackoe bullshit-spew. I dropped my subscription about 5 years ago because the actual financial/business news it contains is available elsewhere, and the RWNJ content just kept increasing.

Correct, there is no longer anything worth reading in the WSJ.

 

[Ishmael]

Correct, there is no longer anything worth reading in the WSJ.

Like most of the outlets that Murdoch owns.

 

[hobie1616]

The program was created to give them a shot at a secure retirement after a lifetime of what may have been backbreaking work. The advocates of raising the retirement age want to take it away.

The stupid and dishonest idea of raising the Social Security retirement age is back

The people who are in the forefront of pushing Social Security “reform” by cutting benefits have gotten pretty good at hiding their intentions behind plausible-sounding jargon and economists’ gibberish.

The latest “reform” package offered by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, for example, calls on lawmakers to “promote stronger economic growth and productive aging” by removing “work and savings disincentives in the current program.”

“Productive aging” — that’s a good one. Sounds reasonable while being utterly vacuous. Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute provides a concise translation: “Raise the retirement age.”

It may not be surprising that the CRFB, a Washington think tank that was heavily funded by the late private equity billionaire Pete Peterson, might want to hide its prescription behind a curtain.

Raising the retirement age is best described as a zombie reform plan. Despite being debunked repeatedly as a benefit cut that falls disproportionately on low-income and Black workers, it still walks among us.

Indeed, the idea has been getting a renewed airing, despite the evidence that it’s a worse idea now than ever.

Joseph Chamie, a former demographer for the United Nations, proposed in a November article for the Hill raising the retirement age to 70 and eliminating the early retirement option, through which workers can start claiming Social Security benefits starting at age 62, with a reduction in lifetime benefits for each year before their normal retirement age. (For those born in 1960 or later, that’s age 67.)

Revealing that, whatever he may know about demographics, he knows almost nothing about Social Security, Chamie asserted that his proposal “could save Social Security for us all.” He managed to make that claim without mentioning any other proposals to shore up the program’s finances, especially raising or eliminating the cap on payroll taxes, a cap that effectively gives the rich a free pass on supporting the program.

The retirement age panacea has been heard beyond these shores. French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed raising that country’s minimum retirement age to 64 from 62. The proposal has sent unionized workers into the streets and prompted other forms of protest.

And that’s in a country where the anti-poverty safety net is vastly better than in the United States: About 4.4% of French retirees older than 65 live in poverty, compared with 10.3% in the United States.

Now let’s take a closer look at the CRFB’s proposal, embodied in a Jan. 30 white paper titled “Principles for Social Security Reform,” which is itself based on a CRFB paper published in 2019.

In that paper, the “productive aging” trope was explicitly tied to an increase in both the full retirement and early retirement ages — to 68 and 63, respectively, with further increases averaging one year every quarter-century or so.

In both versions, the retirement age increase is based on the assumption that older workers would continue to work, perhaps till they dropped, if not for the “mixed retirement signals that often draw them into early retirement and treat retirement itself as a binary choice.” That implies that workers are almost duped into filing for Social Security, when they would be so much happier staying on the job.

The CRFB wrings its collective hands over its discovery that “a smaller share of older Americans work today than half a century [ago], even as life expectancy has risen dramatically and the nature of employment and technology has made it easier to work at older ages.”

This is a remarkably blinkered view of Americans’ work experience. Retiring in one’s 60s is a sign of the improved quality of life available to workers today compared with those of 50 years ago, not a sign of laziness or irresponsibility.




As for whether it’s “easier” to work into one’s 70s than it used to be, that may be true for authors of think tank papers in air conditioned offices, but perhaps not for the millions of Americans who spent their careers hauling, digging, driving and building, outside in the elements.

Underlying the proposals to raise the retirement age is the wholly false notion that life expectancy is increasing for all Americans at an inexorable rate. The reasoning is that the drafters of Social Security in 1935 never expected people to live this long, so they failed to provide for the increase in costs that would be the result.

The only suitable countermove, ostensibly, is to raise the retirement age to pare back the years that the average retiree will be collecting benefits.

We’ve explained over and over again that this picture of life expectancy is distorted. The CRFB’s 2019 paper says that “life expectancy has risen dramatically,” but that all depends. For example, it’s true that average life expectancy from birth rose by more than 15 years between the 1930s and 2020,to nearly 79.

Most of that increase occurred because of reductions in infant mortality. The more relevant measure is life expectancy from age 65, which tracks the average length of retirement and Social Security collecting. There the picture isn’t quite as cheery. It’s also one in which demographics are an important factor.

For all Americans, average life expectancy at age 65 has risen since the 1930s by about 6.6 years, to about 84 and a half. The increase has been about the same for white workers. But for Black people in general, the gain is just over five years, to an average of a bit over 83, and for Black men it’s less than four years and two months, to an average of about 81 and four months.

That’s not all. There are also pronounced disparities in life expectancy by income. The CRFB waves away this issue: “Raising the retirement ages does not — as some claim — disproportionately affect lower earners or regressively cut benefits,” its 2019 paper asserted.

Who claimed this? The Congressional Budget Office and National Academy of Sciences, to name two sources that painstakingly documented the disproportion.

Finally, there’s the discomfiting fact that American life expectancy has not been rising inexorably. Rather, it’s been dropping. The average life expectancy from birth fell to just over 76 in 2021 from nearly 79 in 2019, the sharpest fall in a two-year span since before the Great Depression.

The fall is generally blamed on the drug overdose crisis and COVID-19, which suggests that another decline is likely to be found in 2022. But there’s no waving away the implications — drugs and COVID are inescapable features of life today.

Social Security “reformers” always tend to forget the realities faced by the vast majority of American workers. The program was created to give them a shot at a secure retirement after a lifetime of what may have been backbreaking work. The advocates of raising the retirement age want to take it away.

 

[Steam Flyer]

Aside from all the above (which is true and valid AFAIK, re life expectancy etc), raising the SocSec age has already been done.

How many times do we raise the age when life expectancy... most especially life expentancy among the wage workers at the low end of the income scale, those that are most dependent on SocSec... is actively dropping -AND- the guys trying to "reform" SocSec are only making that worse?

 

[jzk]

We should definitely cut taxes and eliminate social security.

But there is absolutely no case for fucking over the people that already paid into it.

 

[Not for nothing]

Just keep fucking over the working middle class,
Let's see retired and a small pension tax about 20-25%
People that don't work, earnings come from stocks about 10-15%
1%ers with all their tax right off's Homes, cars, boats, planes country club dues, churches and of course political donations they pay 0%

FLAT TAX everyone pays the same dime on the dollar, deficient paid off and not more printing money.
Just got to love the republicans as they keep fucking us over.

 

[Bus Driver]

We should definitely cut taxes and eliminate social security.

But there is absolutely no case for fucking over the people that already paid into it.

At what age do most folks begin paying into Social Security?

How long should we wait to cut it? Before they retire? Say "Fuck you" sooner?

 

[jzk]

At what age do most folks begin paying into Social Security?

How long should we wait to cut it? Before they retire? Say "Fuck you" sooner?

Anyone that paid into social security should be given an appropriate payout.

Social security is currently a "fuck you" to people that paid into it. That is why it should end.

 

[Voyageur]

Anyone that paid into social security should be given an appropriate payout.

Social security is currently a "fuck you" to people that paid into it. That is why it should end.

like everyone currently working? you are of the entitlement generation. adding nothing to the future. your generation created the problems that people today are trying to solve. yet, you say fuck you, to the future of our great country. typical right wing asshole.
maga as a slogan is one thing. how about we go back to when america was so great and revisit the tax structure, that paid for all the good things, that have created the most powerful nation on earth. it wasn't tax cuts for the rich.

 

[jzk]

like everyone currently working? you are of the entitlement generation. adding nothing to the future. your generation created the problems that people today are trying to solve. yet, you say fuck you, to the future of our great country. typical right wing asshole.
maga as a slogan is one thing. how about we go back to when america was so great and revisit the tax structure, that paid for all the good things, that have created the most powerful nation on earth. it wasn't tax cuts for the rich.

Like anyone that paid in gets to keep their investment.

The social security system is one big "fuck you" to everyone working.

The US became the most powerful nation on earth before social security and the income tax.

 

[Steam Flyer]

Anyone that paid into social security should be given an appropriate payout.

Social security is currently a "fuck you" to people that paid into it. That is why it should end.

As usual, completely wrong.

Social Security has been given the label of a middle class retirement program; but it is not and it cannot be one. SocSec is an -INSURANCE- program intended to keep people from resorting to sleeping under bridges and eating out of dumpster when they are too old to work, or disabled.

Unfortunately the benefits have been expanded to those who have not paid in, to a degree that is unsustainable with the current model. We either need to reduce benefits (and I would suggest that it -IS- fair to reduce some classes of payouts to people who have never paid in) and/or increase the pay-in, such as raising the income cap.

...
The US became the most powerful nation on earth before social security and the income tax.

You are as ignorant of history as everything else. Isn't it a damn shame the government doesn't let you sell infected offal as "meat" and powdered pigeon shit as a cure for cancer! You could make millions, goddam this nanny-state government intrusion and oppression of the businessman!

 

[Voyageur]

Like anyone that paid in gets to keep their investment.

The social security system is one big "fuck you" to everyone working.

The US became the most powerful nation on earth before social security and the income tax.

originally, the income tax worked. it was mostly the rich who had to pay. today, pretty much everything is a fuck you to working people. i do not consider the rich, working people.

 

[Blue Crab]

Unfortunately the benefits have been expanded to those who have not paid in, to a degree that is unsustainable with the current model. We either need to reduce benefits (and I would suggest that it -IS- fair to reduce some classes of payouts to people who have never paid in) and/or increase the pay-in, such as raising the income cap.

Retirement funds should not be used for other stuff.

 

[jzk]

As usual, completely wrong.

Social Security has been given the label of a middle class retirement program; but it is not and it cannot be one. SocSec is an -INSURANCE- program intended to keep people from resorting to sleeping under bridges and eating out of dumpster when they are too old to work, or disabled.

Unfortunately the benefits have been expanded to those who have not paid in, to a degree that is unsustainable with the current model. We either need to reduce benefits (and I would suggest that it -IS- fair to reduce some classes of payouts to people who have never paid in) and/or increase the pay-in, such as raising the income cap.



You are as ignorant of history as everything else. Isn't it a damn shame the government doesn't let you sell infected offal as "meat" and powdered pigeon shit as a cure for cancer! You could make millions, goddam this nanny-state government intrusion and oppression of the businessman!

Wrong again, dipshit.

The economy of the US became the most productive in the world around 1890. The income tax began in 1913. Social security began in 1935.

Whatever social security is, retirement plan or "insurance policy," whoever paid into it should get that benefit to the extent that they paid into it.

The point is that it is terrible at either of those things. It is a huge waste of resources that could actually go to taking care of people in need.

If you misrepresent a product, that is fraud and already illegal.

Man, you really are the biggest dipshit here.

 

[jzk]

Just keep fucking over the working middle class,

Nothing fucks the working class over like socialism. And to the extent that we have socialism, the working class is fucked over.

Nothing has lifted the working class out of abject poverty the way capitalism has, or at all for that matter. The more we have, the less poverty we will have. The less we have, the more poverty we will have.

 

[Bus Driver]

Nothing fucks the working class over like socialism. And to the extent that we have socialism, the working class is fucked over.

Nothing has lifted the working class out of abject poverty the way capitalism has, or at all for that matter. The more we have, the less poverty we will have. The less we have, the more poverty we will have.

I thought it was "grinding poverty". Shit, and I just ordered all those shirts.

Maybe I can get the printer to stop the order.

How about giving a "heads up" when the talking points change, m'kay?

 

[jzk]

I thought it was "grinding poverty". Shit, and I just ordered all those shirts.

Maybe I can get the printer to stop the order.

How about giving a "heads up" when the talking points change, m'kay?

That is your post? One time I called it grinding poverty, and another time abject poverty?