A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare.
For Social Security, the budget endorses “modest adjustments to the retirement age for future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy.” It calls for lowering benefits for the highest-earning beneficiaries. And it emphasizes that those ideas are not designed to take effect immediately: “The RSC Budget does not cut or delay retirement benefits for any senior in or near retirement.”
Biden has blasted Republican proposals for the retirement programs, promising that he will not cut benefits and instead proposing in his recent White House budget to cover the future shortfall by raising taxes on upper earners.
Should we behave like the French when they raised the retirement age and riot?
Damn you, I’m in
They want to strip social security to pay for more tax cuts for the top 1%
You have to work more so rich people pay less taxes than you.
“Medicare is projected to become insolvent in 2028, and Social Security will follow in 2033. After that, benefits will be forcibly cut unless more revenues are added.”
As of today, payroll tax contributions only apply to the first $168,600 of income.
https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/HowAreSocialSecurity.htm
If you remove that cap, or apply it to other forms of income besides payroll, the funding problem pretty much goes away.
Except that’s a sham way of framing things that most people use.
The US is monetarily sovereign and can always issue enough currency to meet any demands upon it.
Uncle Sam doesn’t go around collecting dollars like a beggar to apply to things. It creates money directly through spending, or backstops the creation of demand deposits by private banks via the reserve system. Money has to be created before it can be destroyed through taxation.
The issue isn’t, “Where will we get the money?”
The REAL issue is, “Will we have the infrastructure to care for our elderly?”
Warren Mosler goes over this in one of his better short pieces of literature.
The US is monetarily sovereign and can always issue enough currency to meet any demands upon it.
Yes. When congress appropriates funding and it’s signed into law, the effect is that the US Treasury spends that money into existence. The mechanism, of course, is that Treasury directs the fed to issue bonds to create the money, and when you pay taxes that money doesn’t go into an account Congress can spend from, it goes back to the fed to zero out the bonds used to create it.
Of course, if we continue cutting taxes the way we have, that will eventually balloon the amount of currency in circulation and that can be problematic if it’s untethered to reality
And if we take both your comments together, we end up with “should we get rid of the cap so the rich pay a fair share or keep it and collectively pay for things by way of inflation?”
Personally, I’m all for uncapping it.
It’s not about the rich paying their fair share.
We need to tax them specifically to reduce their insane power in our system.
The federal government doesn’t need them to finance a damn thing. It can finance anything it wants to with the stroke of a pen.
We are not reliant on the rich.
“should we get rid of the cap so the rich pay a fair share or keep it and collectively pay for things by way of inflation?”
The problem with the latter is honestly that inflation hurts the poor a lot more than it does the wealthy and if anything, gives the wealthy a lot more power. Power is really the issue here- when the rich have the ability to override democracy by spending money, that’s a big damned problem
The Democrats need to immediately trumpet this thing from the rooftops. The GOP wants to take away Social Security and Medicare. 170 of them put their names on this budget, if NBC is to be believed.
The Republicans want you to never be able to retire, and they want you to never have the healthcare that your parents and grandparents had or that they themselves enjoy. They want you to be poor and stay poor, and they want the same for your children.
Republican voters will accept it wholeheartedly simply because a Republican suggested it. Then they’ll view themselves as heroes who made a huge sacrifice for the good of the country when really none of this needed to happen and the country’s just getting worse. Of course, when they actually get to retirement age they’ll be confused and angry as to why THEY can’t retire yet; after all, they’re heroes!
Honestly this might be the only thing that gets my parents to vote in their best interest. Because theyre slightly over one presidency away from retiring.
It won’t impact anyone who retires in the next 15-20 years. I guarantee it. They’re targeting Gen X and millennials with this one.
GenX will largely be retiring in the next 15-20 years. So if your estimate is true, its squarely targeting Millennials. Goddamn, how much more can Millennials take? They were in college at the peak of tuition costs, with high student loan interest rates, graduated right into the time of the Great Recession, having their career progress stunted by the pandemic, haven’t been able to save for retirement on their own, and now Republicans want to raise the bar again so they can’t retire on Social Security until later, and even when they do they’ll get lower payouts?
I can’t even imagine what Millennials are feeling now.
Gen X will be retiring never. I’m older genX and nope. It’s true we are close to the age our parents did (well, not my parents actually, dad died in his 50s and Mom worked till mid 70s) but no, the “wealth transfer” will skip us, we will just work, barring disability, straight through. I take my PTO, work out, and try to move through life at a sustainable pace in general.
That only seemed plausible back when we were starting to live longer and stay healthier.
That train left the US quite a while back.
Gotta love republicans “the spend and print regime” was bi-partisan and, importantly, initiated under Trump. Further they’ve continuously held control of the Senate while Biden has been in power and the house since 2022.
Finally the Affordable Care Act was a republican bill that Obama compromised on instead of the Democratic proposal, to get some improvements through. It’s always amusing when Republicans now shit all over it…