Vote NO on the GENIUS Act

 To: MN senators Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar

I urge you to vote NO on the GENIUS Act.

One of the schemes I've read about is to replace the Treasury Bonds in the Trust Fund with cryptocurrency, with the added bonus that it can't be redeemed for 20 years. That money was put aside to handle the shortages due to baby boomer retirements. Trashing it means that only 80% of benefits can be paid. 

The GOP keeps trying to cut benefits and raise retirement ages instead of adjusting SocSec tax rates and salary caps. Social Security is currently only 100% funded for 10 years instead of the 75-year full funding it's supposed to have (it's a manufactured crisis). Their crypto scheme would drop full funding to zero years.

I’m a Wendell, Minnesota resident. It's a town of 167 people. I’m retired and my only income is Social Security. Trump and the GOP are in the process of destroying Social Security because, one, they don't make any profit from it, and two, companies think their 6.2% Social Security tax contribution on behalf of employees is their money. (Try getting employers to give it to employees so that workers could pay the full 12.4% tax.)

This “genius” bill would legitimize and deregulate private “stablecoins,” effectively giving corporations, tech billionaires, and even Donald Trump the power to mint their own currencies. 

The GENIUS Act gives the Crypto Industry exactly what they want: Bank powers, without bank rules. It lets corporations create private currencies, overlooks existential risk to our financial system, and even includes a loophole to bypass U.S. law by allowing for registering overseas first.

If it passed, the bill would strip away financial safeguards we all rely on.

The GENIUS Act is not about financial innovation, it is about creating a system ripe for crypto scams. 

Stop this reckless bill. Vote NO. 

Sincerely,

 

Keith Wilson

2025 Budget Reconciliation Bill plus Republican Offenses

 To Congresswoman Michelle Fischbach (MN-07),

This week, the House of Representatives passed their budget reconciliation bill, a hodgepodge of policies that would kick 13.7 million people off their health insurance and give millionaires and billionaires trillions in tax breaks. You voted for this and claimed that your constituents, in no uncertain terms, wanted the 2017 tax cuts to be permanent. How much did you tell them they would get (and lose) compared to what the wealthy would gain? Or did you just tell them what they would get?

If this bill passes the Senate, it would be the largest Medicaid cut AND the largest tax cut for the wealthy in history. Then, as it goes into effect, it would trigger the largest across-the-board Medicare cut in history, too.

This is corruption on a massive scale. How much in campaign contributions did you get? How many attack ads against your Democrat opponents were paid for by wealthy PACs supposedly not connected to your campaign?

Republicans are big on “Individual Responsibility” and 0% for “Social Responsibility.” And this bill is just more of the same. Gutting of the EPA, the Education Department, USAID, the IRS, and more. Let’s get back to the days of rivers catching on fire.

A few of the recent actions of Republicans:

• Deportation and Detention of Student Protesters and Foreign Scholars.

• Denial of Due Process and sending people to foreign prisons.

• Executive Actions Targeting Colleges and Universities.

• Executive Orders Targeting Law Firms.

• Stripping Power from Independent Regulatory Agencies.

• DOGE Access to Government Payment Systems.

• Executive Order Freezing Federal Grant Funding--affecting public health, education, small businesses, infrastructure projects, and funding for everything from infrastructure projects to lifesaving medical research at St. Jude, UTHSC, and other institutions. Killing cancer research? Really?

• Executive Order Ending Birthright Citizenship.

• Illegal mass termination of probationary federal employees. That should help efficiency.

• Termination of employment for 80,000 Veterans.

• Trashing the Social Security System as part of the decades-long effort to privatize it (read: profits). A program running for 89 years that has been instrumental in cutting senior poverty and ending poorhouses. What happens to SSI, Disability, and survivors’ benefits? It’s not just retirement. Note that Social Security is not part of the Federal Budget and the National Debt. Cutting benefits and raising retirement ages do not impact either.

• Letting the Executive Branch illegally assume duties specifically allocated to Congress.

• Arrest and intimidation of members of the Judicial Branch (coequal with Congress and the Executive branches).

• Publicly insulting and trashing visiting Foreign heads of State

This doesn’t even touch on Congressional insider trading (that sent Martha Stewart to prison).

An Update from Rep. Michelle Fischbach

Tracking the Trump Administration's Harmful Executive Actions

Keith Wilson, retired

Resident of Minnesota’s 7th district

525 Dybdal Street

Wendell, MN  56590-0123

Rep. Fischbach sides with Trump and Russia

Trump's lies and incompetence don't inspire confidence. Wake up and serve your constituents, not the chaos-causing oligarchs. It's bad enough that the people who write the laws exempt themselves from prohibitions against insider trading.

One of us is in denial of reality. Do you think Trump's hatchet to the federal government and his plans to privatize (make it for-profit) benefit us? 

How about his plans to gut Social Security (with a 50-year low in employee numbers), starting with firing employees and cutting regional offices? He's already fired government inspectors that were focused on fraud and waste. 

For decades, Republicans have refused to meaningfully adjust the revenue side of Social Security, instead focusing on cutting benefits and raising retirement ages. You think those people care about us? Do you think they care that they have reduced Social Security's 100% 75-year solvency down to 100% 10-year solvency over the last 40 years? 

No, Republicans want us suffering under private for-profit retirement, survivor, and disability plans that are subject to mismanagement, theft, fraud, brokerage firm bankruptcies, and denials of coverage. Think 20% overhead (same as for-profit health insurance) instead of the 2% overhead the Social Security program currently has. 

Did anyone take responsibility when Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme collapsed (that the SEC was repeatedly warned about)? For years, firms lied to their customers about where they were investing their funds, telling them the make-believe investments (by Madoff) were what they invested their retirement funds in. A Ponzi scheme, just like they are telling us what Social Security is. 

Republicans want to eliminate the matching corporate Social Security tax contributions. They think it's their money. They are not about to give that money to us workers so that we can pay the full 12.4% rate on 100% of our net income. Right now, half of Social Security tax contributions are tax-exempt for employees. 

No, Republicans want to gut revenues to speed up their Social Security manufactured crisis. How about if we instead raise or eliminate the salary cap? Won't that make it fairer? It's not like Republicans are going to change capital gains tax rates or hedge-fund tax rates or eliminate corporate subsidies or the corrupt insider-trading.

And how about Trump's cryptocurrency plans? He wants the federal government to invest in them, allegedly with a 20-year minimum no-sell clause. Would he use the Social Security Trust Fund for the investments? You know, the money that's supposed to help cover Baby Boomer retirements.

At this point, anything goes for our Felon-In-Chief. Including siding with Russia and blackmailing Ukraine (rare-earth metals).

Wake up.

A letter to Representative (MN-7) Michelle Fischbach for her gushing praise of Trump's plans.