Make No Mistake, Trump WILL cut Social Security and Medicare
Donald Trump has bragged about cutting entitlements for a while now, but he seems to be purposely backtracking after the fallout this has caused with voters.
Do not be fooled and do not let anyone you know be fooled into believing that any federal entitlement programs will be safe if Donald Trump is elected to a second term in 2024. The fact that we even call these programs “entitlements” is infuriating because they are programs that we, the taxpayers, have been paying into over the span of our lifetimes. After we get through this next election we need to talk about rebranding these programs to something like “give me my moula back or I’ll cut you-ments.”
Last week, I tweeted out the following video (click below to play) to reiterate something Donald Trump has been promising to do for years. As always, when Trump uses the buzzword “entitlements” he is referring to Social Security and Medicare. The Republican Party has spent years bastardizing the word so that it is seen as something bad, similar to welfare. The truth is, a lot of the people voting for conservatives don’t even understand that these are programs they have paid into, and it is their own money coming back to them.
While I typically expect to get a lot of negative trolling responses to a tweet like this, the level of Trump paid, or Russian paid, or whatever paid trolling was kicked up a notch. These responses were targeted, organized, and completely outraged at the mention that Trump was in fact promising to cut benefits.
I have also noticed that a lot of Trump-biased trolling accounts also have blue checks, which now have a monthly cost, so it looks like Elon Musk might be assisting the former president in some way. Bottom line: pointing out the facts about Trump’s stance on entitlements is hitting a certain button with the Trump Campaign, which is frantically trying to rehabilitate years of Trump’s statements.
Here is a quick summary of where we are with entitlements and where we are at risk. If nothing is done, Medicare will be solvent until 2028, and Social Security has been preserved until 2033. Without active and immediate attention, these benefits, which Americans have spent a lifetime paying into, will be reduced due to a lack of funding.
President Biden calls these federal entitlement programs: “the bedrock of financial security for American seniors and for millions of Americans with disabilities.” Currently middle and lower-income Americans pay Social Security taxes on all of their earnings, but highest-income Americans do not, and Biden has proposed raising taxes on the super wealthy to compensate for maintaining benefits for all earners. Moreover, the recent budget proposal presented by President Biden would extend the life of the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund indefinitely.
Donald Trump has not addressed how he would handle the funding shortfall, other than saying he will cut the entitlement programs. Trump and his campaign have been asked many times to comment on their position or elaborate on how they would fix the problem, but they have always declined to make a statement. If Donald Trump truly were committed to saving these programs, as he now says he is, he would be able to specify some way in which he intends to do this — which he has not. Trump would also need to address how he intends to save programs that the bulk of his party in Congress has committed to destroying.
An NBC News deep dive found that Trump has many different kinds of responses that range from:
Being asked on Hardball in December 2004, just before a Republican push to partially privatize the program, if Trump would support individual retirement accounts he said: “I sort of think I would. Something has to be done. Social Security is a huge problem right now, funding it.”
Endorsing former Representative Paul Ryan’s 2012 plan to a Medicare restructure, to convert Medicare into a “premium support” system that would cap spending for future retirees and give them vouchers to buy insurance plans
Launching his campaign for president in 2015, Trump reversed his stance saying: “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.”
Claiming in 2016 that he would protect those programs and tackle retirement spending in his White House budgets — which he never did.
Trump’s fiscal 2021 budget endorsed billions of dollars of Social Security cuts for disabled seniors, and he insisted on changing the name of the program to “Social Security Disability Insurance.” The benefits under Trump’s plan for disabled workers would would have maxed out at six months instead of 12 months. Trump’s proposed budget also called for reducing Supplemental Security Income benefits for those who live with other Social Security recipients, which means elderly couples.
Trump was asked on CNBC in January 2020, whether entitlements would ever “be on your plate,” and he said, “At some point they will be.” Trump added: “At the right time, we will take a look at that. You know, that’s actually the easiest of all things.” At a March 2020 Fox News town hall, when pressed about the need to cut “entitlements” to reduce the debt, Trump responded: “Oh, we’ll be cutting, but we’re also going to have growth like you’ve never had before.”
While it is easy to say that Donald Trump is just moving to more moderate ground ahead of the election in order to preserve votes, we can review his earlier pattern to see that his strategy appears to be on repeat. In the time leading up to a critical election, Trump first rallies his conservative base by actively threatening to cut entitlement programs, and then does an about face in his rhetoric in the last few months of an election year.
As on most issues, Trump has changed his tune to suit whatever whim or need he had in the moment, but these changes to entitlements have a pattern. More than that, you can completely ignore his words and look at his actions to determine the truth. If Donald Trump is elected again in 2024, and he has the majority in Congress, he will, in the blink of an instant, cut these programs our country has come to rely upon.
Trump’s severe stance on “terminating” Obamacare over the years has also been more than just his dislike of President Obama. This only further emphasizes his desire to cut programs that affect the lower and middle classes, that threaten the wealth of the rich. Sadly, many of his own supporters, who are themselves part of the lower income section, fail to realize that they are on a Trump chopping block of their own making. Social Security and Medicare are programs that 99% of Americans have come to rely upon and Donald Trump is openly threatening their stability. Under this premise alone, it makes no sense that anyone in this income bracket would even consider supporting Trump in this election.
Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter, is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines, and an analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
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Logic has never been a strong suit of the diehard Trump supporter.............
If pmurt communicates in any way, he is lying.