[image_credit]REUTERS/Tom Brenner[/image_credit][image_caption]After starting to serve as president in 2017, Trump’s budget proposals each year have sought large cuts in funding for Social Security disability.[/image_caption]
This should not come as a surprise. When he first ran for president, in 2000, he said he wanted to privatize Social Security, calling it a “Ponzi scheme.” He wanted to eliminate guaranteed benefits, and have people gamble on the stock market instead. He also promoted raising the age of full benefits up to 70.
After starting to serve as president in 2017, his budget proposals each year have sought large cuts in funding for Social Security disability. His latest one, for fiscal year 2021, seeks $75 billion in cuts for recipients of Social Security Disability (over half of whom are age 55 +), over 10 years. This includes $10 billion in benefit cuts, plus plans to reduce the number of people enrolled by about 5 percent. That would be accomplished with harsher work rules that determine who can qualify. Another cut is to lower the initial retroactive benefit that people get when they first go on Social Security Disability. It currently is 12 months retroactive, but Trump wants to reduce it to six months.
Sought cuts for administrative expenses
His budgets have also included cuts for Social Security’s administrative expenses. That translates into fewer offices, shorter hours, fewer staff, and longer times to process applications to get on Social Security, or even to get answers to simple questions.
Don’t be fooled by Trump’s focus on Social Security just for the disabled. People on regular retirement Social Security had better worry, too. His 2021 budget proposal talks about a need to “reduce the rate of increase” in Social Security payments. That sounds like code words to reduce the annual Cost Of Living Adjustment; increase the age to start getting benefits; reduce the initial benefit formula – or maybe all of the above.
When you think about the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic effect on families and workers, the importance of Social Security becomes all the more apparent. The recession that accompanies our pandemic in the U.S., (worsened by Trump’s botched response) will be depressing future Social Security benefits for an estimated 4 million Americans who become eligible in 2022, because of the severe drop in average wages nationally. According to a study by the Center for American Progress, their benefits will be about $1,428 per year lower than if the pandemic never happened.
The payroll tax issue
Trump has done something with Social Security in light of the pandemic: He is allowing businesses to forgo collecting Social Security payroll taxes for their employees, for September through December. After that, those missing taxes would have to be collected and paid. Not surprisingly, few businesses are choosing to follow this option. To get a four-month vacation from the payroll taxes, only to have to then pay them back, doesn’t make any sense.
Trump has said something else, which is extremely alarming: If re-elected, he will consider doing away with the payroll tax altogether. If that were to occur, and no other revenue source found to replace it, then we already know the result. Social Security’s chief actuary has testified that if this were to happen, all Social Security Disability benefits would cease in mid 2021, and all Social Security Retirement benefits would cease in mid 2023.
What was he thinking? Despite his coyness, we can see what Trump really wants: his long-held dream of destroying the current Social Security system, and turning it into a privatized gamble. Andrew Biggs, who helped write President George W. Bush’s ill-fated privatization proposal, explained recently that Trump’s ideas can lead to changing Social Security into two parts: a small, income-tax funded benefit for only the poorest, and private investment accounts for everyone else.
So, Trump really looks at the pandemic as a way to further his goal of wrecking and privatizing Social Security. We all need to be seriously concerned.
Buddy Robinson is a former staff director of MN Citizens Federation NE, who has worked for several years with MN AFL-CIO retirees.
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Retirement for the upper 10% doesn’t need Social Security, and many wealthy people see little reason to subsidize the survival of fellow-citizens poorer than themselves. After all, before FDR, we had “poor houses,” and there are plenty of bridges under which those of lesser character than the wealthy can sleep. Age, illness, disability – it’s your family’s problem, not ours. It’s a return to the Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the same disdain for children, the elderly, the disabled, and anyone else not born with the proverbial silver spoon. Anne RIchards, Governor of Texas in the early 1990s said of George Bush, “He was born on 3rd base and thinks he hit a triple,” and that same judgment applies – and then some – to Donald Trump. One difference is that Bush’s fortune was gained honestly, or as honestly as one could expect in the oil business. The Trump fortune is based on less-than-honest dealing going back to his immigrant grandfather.
Thank you for raising awareness on this! The White House response also makes clear what they think of Seniors.
So if you leave out the rest of the story, some important facts in a statement made by Trump, the headline sounds almost believable. Trump: (“At the end of the year, on the assumption that I win, I’m going to terminate the payroll tax,” he said at a press conference. “We’ll be paying into Social Security through the general fund.”) That sounds a lot like an alternative plan for funding SS. Maybe it’s a better way but we’ll never know if we hide the plan or just pretend it’s not there. It’s not that hard to find if you look for it.
Nice to hear from you Buddy. Still stirring up good trouble I see. Hope you are well.
This makes three consecutive presidents who have taken aim at Social Security.
Disgusting.