Donald Trump is coming for your Social Security: How the GOP plans a bait and switch to cut taxes
Donald Trump is coming for your Social Security: How the GOP plans a bait and switch to cut taxes — and pensions
by Heather Digby Parton at Salon
http://www.salon.com/2017/04/12/donald-trump-is-coming-for-your-social-security-how-the-gop-plans-a-bait-and-switch-to-cut-taxes-and-pensions/
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The Trump team is also, unsurprisingly, being dishonest about its intentions. Social Security expert Nancy Altman described this move as a Trojan horse but considering Trump’s ostentatious promises to protect the program, perhaps it’s better described as a garden variety bait and switch. Simply put, Trump and his team are planning to completely abandon Social Security’s dedicated funding stream from the Federal Insurance Contributions Act payroll deduction and pay for the program with general revenue. They will sell this as a tax cut for workers, which is what it will look like on the paycheck.
But Trump’s rumored innovation is to replace the money with a form of value-added tax, which means that typical workers, who spend most of their money on consumer goods, will still pay taxes; they will just lose their retirement guarantee. Rich people will get their tax cuts and don’t need Social Security anyway. It’s a GOP win-win.
What this means is that Social Security will become part of the normal budget process, subject to the whim of each Congress as legislators appropriate money for wars and pet projects and their favorite form of fearmongering nonsense: “deficit reduction.” It is inevitable that the basic contract all workers have with their government — that they will commit a portion of their wages to the Federal Insurance Contributions Act account and will be guaranteed a pension 40 years from now — will be declared null and void. That contract has resulted in payouts to several generations of workers since its inception in the 1930s, no thanks to the Republicans who have consistently tried to find ways to dismantle it.
Although the assaults on the safety net programs have been relentless, at each turn Americans have fought back, the most recent example being when former President George W. Bush tried to privatize the Social Security system by diverting the funds to Wall Street. That plan was thwarted by activism and organization and the epic stock market crash of 2007 took it off the table for the foreseeable future.
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