Social Security and Medicare Are Next
Recent public statements about cuts to Medicaid and food stamp assistance mean that Republicans intend to fund their $2 trillion in cuts to benefit the rich with our hard-earned entitlements.
Do not be fooled and do not let anyone you know be fooled into believing that any of our entitlement programs are safe. The Republican Party has just passed a Budget Resolution that calls for max tax cuts: $2 trillion over the next 10 years, from somewhere to be later determined, so that the richest Americans can have more tax breaks. The fact that we even call these programs “entitlements” is because they are programs that we, the taxpayers, have been paying into over the span of our lifetimes. It is not a bad word, just one made dirty by Republicans.
Nearly a year ago, before this last election, I tweeted out the following video 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.
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 or ended altogether due to a lack of funding.
President Biden called 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 proposed raising taxes on the super wealthy to compensate for maintaining benefits for all earners. (The budget proposal presented by President Biden last year would have extended the life of the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund indefinitely.)
Donald Trump never addressed how he would handle the funding shortfall during the election, other than saying he will continue to cut entitlement programs. Instead, he has sent out his Ambassador of Hypocrisy, Elon Musk, to continue to fire federal employees at record pace. Trump and his campaign were 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 essential programs like Social Security and Medicare, he would be able to specify some way in which he intends to do this — but he has not. Instead, Donald Trump sits back like “a Godfather” and watches as Musk, through DOGE, continues to fire essential personnel and haphazardly eliminate essential programs, like Ebola protections.
An NBC News deep dive found that Trump has had many different kinds of responses that ranged 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 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.”
This strategy is clearly on repeat. In the time leading up to this last critical election, Trump first rallied his conservative base by actively threatening to cut entitlement programs, and then he did an about face in his rhetoric for the last few months heading into November. Apparently, it worked, because enough of the electorate was fooled into believing Donald Trump would preserve their well-earned safety net.
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.
While programs like Medicaid and food stamp assistance for the poorest Americans are now at risk of being completely eliminated so that we can give the rich more of their “fair share,” the chopping block for this second Trump administration is one of the longest we have ever seen. This means that if Trump is successful in destroying these tax-payer funded entitlement programs that provide Medicaid and food stamps, there will be nothing to stop him from moving on to Social Security and Medicare.
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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Entitlements? My husband and I paid a lot of taxes over our lifetime, we paid into social security since we were teens! He passed away at 64 and that $ is mine, not because I am entitled but because we worked our whole lifetime putting $ away for this time in our lives! Change your label of social security as an entitlement, it is an annuity.
How do these programs threaten the wealthy?