LOL - I am a social worker with a master’s degree and have navigated countless systems through the years. The Medicare/Medigap/Advantage system is giving me hives and nightmares. They are definitely difficult to understand in some respects. I’ve set up an appointment at my local Area Aging office to get a rundown of the current system in place and I have a broker set if if needed. Lots of research ahead of me.
I am somewhat more concerned about the agency I work for. We rely on federal Title IV funding from the Social Security Act for many of our children in placement. If children aren’t eligible for that funding (there are a lot of mandated eligibility requirements) it then passes to the state and county and we have a LOT of kids in placement right now. The county commissioners will not be happy at that point.
Changes may be proposed that would keep the current benefits for people already on SS, but for those who aren’t on it yet they will extend the date when SS starts and scale back some of the monetary benefits that will hopefully keep it solvent for another 30 years.
He said he’d make Security Security tax free. That’s going in the opposite direction from killing it. Maybe the GOP will try to kill it and Trump will let them, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Eliminating Social Security would require an act of Congress, and it would guarantee losing the next election for almost any Rep or Senator who voted for it.
Social Security has always been considered pretty much untouchable. Just to show it’s relative importance, back in the 90s when the government put most federal employees on furlough because they couldn’t get a budget passed the only areas that were exempt were the DoD and SSA.
He’s going to try. It won’t be a frontal assault, but probably enact policies that will lead to insolvency. Then it’s the dem’s fault, and there won’t be a mass citizenship revolt.
Or in some way allowing it to be linked to stock market performance. Which will look great until the next crash.
The cult is against entitlements.
The cult believes they are entitled to social security.
The cult is incapable of seeing irony.
Trump loves being worshipped by his cult. He’s going to pander to them not piss them off.
If they come after social security it will be after Trump is gone.
Yeah, in this case for sure. Social Security is a mandatory budget expenditure; that is to say, by law it is not part of the discretionary budget that Congress has to pass (or issue a continuing resolution on), and is fully funded by default even it forces the government to take on more debt (which it does). It would take several major acts of Congress to dismantle it and would be broadly unpopular across party lines even by people who profess their undying hatred of “socialism”.
This is not to say that Trump couldn’t do a lot of fuckery with the Social Security Administration (although by default the employees responsible for dispersing entitlements are performing critical functions) but again, this would be enormously unpopular, particularly with the Republican base that skews older. I’m sure Elon Musk, who knows as much about government budgetary processes as he does about interplanetary space travel and in-situ resource utilization for establishing permanent habitats on Mars, which is to say fuck-all, thinks he can amputate Social Security in one fell swoop but he’s in for a real shock when he walks into the building with a sink and figures out that none of these people actually work for him or give a hot red shit about his ‘anarcho-libertarian’ philosophy.
AIUI, taxes on Social Security go directly into the SS trust fund. So there would be no hit on the national debt, but it would hasten the insolvency of the SS trust fund.
A bill eliminating the Windfall Elimination Provision just passed the House with strong bipartisan support. This shows that the politics of the subject are still in favor of supporting social security on both sides of the aisle.
For those who don’t know WEP was enacted during the Reagan administration to wipe out most social security payments from those who didn’t contribute to SS on income that was part of a pension plan but who also had other employment that did contribute more than enough to otherwise be eligible. Me for instance.
That is my main worry. The SS trust fund is slowly being depleted since current payments exceed current SS revenue and all those T-bills that SS has are being cashed. Another worry is this boneheaded notion of not taxing tips. Not sure if this applies to payroll taxes or just federal taxes so it may or may not impact the trust fund depending on how a bill is written.
Once the witching hour comes and SS has depleted all of its accrued wealth, then either the system will pay out benefits to match the incoming payroll tax receipts or Congress will allow the general fund to pick up the difference. Worst case is your benefits could go down at that point.
The fixes aren’t that difficult but require something that Congress lacks- political will. The people think there is a free lunch and they’re going to eat it and the urgency of the impending shortfalls just aren’t being taken seriously. Just increase the payroll tax rate, raise the payroll tax ceiling, and make the benefits even more indexed to benefit low income retirees vs higher income retirees.