A letter to my North Dakota US House and Senate representatives.
For the last 40 years, the GOP has underfunded Social Security, so now the 75-year full funding is down to 10 years! Payroll tax adjustments and taxable salary caps have not kept revenues in line with expenses.
What have Republicans advocated and enacted? Benefit cuts and the raising of retirement ages! All part of the plan to eventually privatize Social Security (and a return to the time of poorhouses).
Survivors' benefits and disability coverage? In the for-profit marketplace? 20% overhead instead of 2%. You continue sabotaging the most successful anti-poverty program ever. Because of GREED. Because you are ideologically opposed to programs that don't generate a profit.
Here's a thought. You broke it, so you fix it. Not with a hairbrained, corrupt plan to cap benefits (more on that below). Try fixing the revenue side of the equation.
Let's raise the caps on incomes subject to Social Security enough to fix YOUR mess. Enough to expand benefits that you have purposely screwed with. Enough to change the retirement age back to 65, so old people aren't being forced to work sicker and weaker than they've ever been. People in their 60s go through a second period of rapid aging (the first occurs in their 40s).
Oh, and company execs who think their half of Social Security tax payments are theirs? That's BS! It's the cost of employing people. Eliminate that, and they damn well better be prepared to give that money to workers so they can pay the full 12.4% tax themselves, the same way self-employed people do. Out of their no longer tax-exempt 6.2% pay increase, of course.
I don't want to hear any more excuses and lies. Social Security is separate by law! You call Social Security the federal budget's biggest expense. It's SELF-FUNDED! It's not a budget expense at all! Social Security contributes not one dime to federal budget deficits or the National Debt.
Those interest-bearing guaranteed Treasury Bonds in the Trust Fund were bought with surplus revenues. If Social Security didn't buy them, the Treasury would have had to sell them to someone else to cover its borrowing. Social Security, with its almost $3 trillion Trust Fund (to fund Baby Boomer retirements), is not broke.
As your constituent, and someone whose only income is Social Security, I’m here to warn you of a new scheme hatched by millionaires and billionaires to trick you into further cutting Social Security. They call it a "Six Figure Limit" proposal that would cap Social Security benefits at $50,000 per person. This scheme, backed by Wall Street billionaires, would not keep pace with inflation—gradually transforming Social Security from an earned benefit into a poverty-level program that hurts younger generations most of all, while billionaire elites hoard even more wealth. That's assuming the program has not yet been privatized.
The real solution is not cutting middle-class benefits, but making billionaires pay their fair share. Social Security should be expanded to reflect the rising costs seniors face, not undermined to protect corporate profits and tax loopholes.
I demand that you reject any proposal to cap Social Security benefits and instead support legislation that expands Social Security by requiring the wealthy to pay in at the same rate as the rest of us, enough to fix your manufactured crisis.
It's called Social Responsibility. There has to be a balance between Social Responsibility and Individual Responsibility. I know that's anathema to Republicans. Grow up.
