Americans are all living longer, so it only makes sense to push back the eligibility age for Social Security - right?
Pushing back the age when workers can claim their full benefit may sound like the fair thing to do in a era of rising longevity - and it would help fix Social Security’s long-range financial imbalance.
But this easy-sounding fix masks two crucial problems. It makes a higher retirement age sound painless - when it actually would cut everyone’s benefits by moving back the goal posts on when you can claim full benefits. Just as important, a higher retirement age would be especially unfair to lower-income workers.
Average longevity has been rising in the United States, but all of the gains have been experienced in higher-income households. A number of studies have reached this conclusion in recent years - but now comes a report from the horse’s mouth, so to speak - the actuaries at the Social Security Administration.
via Reuters.
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Lumping Social Security and Medicare together and calling them ‘entitlements’ is also telling. These are earned benefits, not entitlements, which American workers have contributed to throughout their working lives. Conservatives have long used the word 'entitlements’ to make those earned benefits seem like welfare.
via Entitled to Know.
I think any budget that we pass out of the House must include entitlement reform
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus.
Related Reading:
New Poll Shows Majorities Do Not Support GOP Proposals for Social Security and Medicare.
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Asked Monday if the Trump administration would address “entitlement reform,” White House chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow said it will “probably” look at “larger entitlements” next year. Entitlement reform generally refers to changes or cuts to large government social programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or food stamps.
via CNBC.
Related Reading:
Trump Advisor Re-Affirms Commitment to Cutting Social Security & Medicare.
- This aligns with comments from National Republican Congressional Committee chair, Rep. Steve Stivers, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and several other key GOP members about the need to pay for last year’s tax cuts by ‘reforming’ Social Security and Medicare. ‘Reforming,’ of course, means cutting and privatizing.
With the scribbled ink on December’s GOP tax legislation barely dry, congressional Republicans are promising to target Americans’ earned benefits this year. House Speaker Paul Ryan told a Wisconsin radio interviewer, “We’re going to have to get back… at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit.” Ryan went on to make a number of dubious claims, all to justify future benefit cuts for working Americans, millions of whom already are struggling to make ends meet.
Of course, Ryan has been using this rationale for years. The difference now is that he and his party finally have the power realize their long-held dreams of gutting programs that Americans have paid into for their entire working lives. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is not the firewall against changes to Social Security and Medicare that he promised to be during the campaign.
In opposing these attempts to undermine Social Security and Medicare, it’s important for us to continue to correct a few of Ryan’s mendacious fairy tales about these programs:
Social Security and Medicare are the ‘major drivers’ of the debt
This is a canard budget hawks often use to attack earned benefits. The truth is that Social Security and Medicare Part A are self-funded through workers’ payroll contributions. They do not contribute a penny to the debt. However, one of the biggest drivers of the debt moving forward will be the Trump/GOP tax cut.
Read more from our op-ed here via Palm Beach Post.
QUICK: Will the Trump administration tackle entitlement reform?
KUDLOW: Well, we’ve already tackled a big part of the newest entitlement, namely Obamacare. As far as the larger entitlements, I think everybody’s going to look at that probably next year. I don’t want to be specific, I don’t want to get ahead of our own budgeting, but we’ll get there.
This aligns with comments from National Republican Congressional Committee chair, Rep. Steve Stivers, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and several other key GOP members about the need to pay for last year’s tax cuts by ‘reforming’ Social Security and Medicare. ‘Reforming,’ of course, means cutting and privatizing.
Read more from this post by clicking here.
Mulvaney, who supports Social Security and Medicare reforms, told CNBC ‘we’re working on’ persuading Trump to embrace entitlement reform, including changes to Social Security Disability Insurance.
But I feel from all the budgets that I’ve passed, normalizing entitlement reform, pushing the cause of entitlement reform and the house passing entitlement reform, I’m very proud of that fact. But yeah, of course more work needs to be done, and it really is entitlements. That’s where the work needs to be done, and I’m going to keep fighting for that.
Speaker Paul Ryan via Politico.
Related Reading:
Seniors Relieved as America’s Privatizer-In-Chief Heads for the Exits.
- House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement from Congress lifts a very dark cloud that has hung over older Americans for nearly two decades. During that time, Speaker Ryan has been the Privatizer-in-Chief on Capitol Hill – advocating to turn Medicare into a voucher program and to gamble retirees’ Social Security benefits on the whims of Wall Street.
“But at the end of the day…we’ve got to have entitlement reform and that is why we keep pushing for our health care reform and that’s why we keep pushing for entitlement reform.” - Speaker Paul Ryan
This is no surprise to us. Speaker Ryan has been trying for years to cut earned benefit programs.
We have been keeping track of Congress’ actions on earned benefits and health care.
Click here to view our Congressional timeline.
Members of the conservative Freedom Caucus said Tuesday entitlement reform should be included in the next budget that passes the House, despite President Trump’s campaign promise that he would leave Social Security and Medicare alone.
via The Hill.
Related Reading:
- New Poll Shows Majorities Do Not Support GOP Proposals for Social Security and Medicare.
- In the poll of likely voters, 79% favor increasing Social Security
benefits — and funding that increase by having wealthy Americans pay
the same rate into Social Security as everyone else. Seventy-seven
percent oppose raising the Social Security retirement age to 69, and a
whopping 93% favor allowing Medicare to negotiate to bring down the
price of prescription drugs.
May is Older Americans Month, but the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are putting a serious damper on the celebration. Yes, candidate Trump promised not to touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
But his administration has been actively undermining those pledges. Budget Director Mick Mulvaney — who once called Social Security a Ponzi scheme — questioned the legitimacy of Social Security Disability Insurance — and wouldn’t promise a Presidential veto of legislation to privatize Medicare (a pet project of House Speaker Paul Ryan).
President Trump champions the GOP’s American Health Care Act, which guts
Medicaid, undermines the solvency of Medicare, and allows insurers to
charge older Americans up to five times as much as people in their 20s.