Social Security is in a Manufactured Crisis

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.

To Kevin Cramer, ND Senator

 To Kevin Cramer, ND Senator

4/10/2026

The SAVE Act is a flawed solution to a non-existent problem. Why don't you look at the actual facts about the miniscule rate of non-citizen voting before enacting voter suppression legislation.

Disenfranchising up to 20 million women voters.

Your solution requires women to provide copies of birth certificates along with documentation of any name changes, including a change because of marriage. This is time and money designed to be required of likely Democrat voters.

May I ask why someone was convicted of voter fraud for casting a provisional ballot--a ballot explicitly designed to not count the ballot unless any issues (such as can a former felon in that state vote) are resolved?

Dead people voting? Because of outdated software, some missing birthdates in old data sets still had default data entered which then got translated to showing that people were 150 years old. This was cited as PROOF that dead people were voting.

Your party leader made up stories of bus-loads of illegal immigrants voting, some of whom would go out, put on a fake mustache, and go back in and cast another ballot. There are already procedures in place to prevent such nonsense.

And mail-in ballots? Trump's first-term Postmaster General sabotaged mail-sorting machines to delay mail-in ballots. And now Trump wants to eliminate mail-in voting. Some precincts have every ballot as mail-in. I used mail-in because of a disability in a district that eventually changed to all mail-in voting.

Limiting voting machines and locations to create lines that are so long that they prevent people voting in time. Purging voter rolls. Publishing materials with wrong voting dates. Fake ballot drop-off boxes. A demand that elections be run federally. All voter suppression ploys. 

Did you know that before the 2020 election, Trump said that after most voting machine ballots were counted, and before mail-in votes were tallied (taking longer because they don't get counted until election day), he would declare victory (the Red Mirage) and then cry fraud when the totals turned against him? This was before the election!

The SAVE Act is just another in a long line of cheating to win elections.

So, no, your response doesn't fit reality. Look at the data. Look at what you're demanding of voters. Look at the cheating you just voted for.

By the way, how's the National Debt reduction going? 

How's the demonizing of LGBT+ going? Passages in the Bible about pedophilia being mistranslated to be about homosexuality makes it easier, doesn't it? 

Your religion concerns your behavior. Pretending it extends to everyone else is delusional. Try using scientific findings. I bet you don't know that XY individuals can have female bodies because of known genetic defects? Sex and gender are spectrums. They are not limited by a single binary gene on one single chromosome. I'm pushing 70 and even I know better.

Letter to My Rep, Gays, Ideology, and HR 7661

 Letter to Julie Fedorchak, US House Representative for North Dakota, 3/23/2026

REJECT HR 7661: Stop the National Assault on Public Education, and Other Observations

Gay kids read hundreds of books about straight kids, and remain gay. But you're afraid if Daniel reads one book about gay kids, he's going to wake up tomorrow and ask Brad to the prom. 

Your religion governs your behavior. Not mine. If you think the Old Testament laws should apply, why don't you advocate white slavery and eschew the wearing of jewelry?

I thought Republicans were all about freedom. Right. The freedom to go without unpolluted food, air, water, and soil. The freedom to work two or three jobs to earn a living. The freedom to have someone else decide which books you can read. The freedom to go bankrupt because of medical bills. The freedom from scientific truths. The freedom to die when an abortion could have saved one's life. The freedom to not be able to marry the consenting adult that you love. The freedom to not be able to bargain collectively with fellow workers at one's job. The freedom to be deported without due process by people who write and execute their own "administrative" warrants. The freedom to helplessly witness the GOP enabling a racist, misogynistic, vitriolic dictator who wants to abolish the Constitution as he rewrites history.

The GOP advocates the abandonment of any Social Responsibility in favor of a cynical ideology of Personal Responsibility, instead of a balance between them.

If you like ruthless authoritarian governments with unaccountable, murderous secret police and loss of individual rights, why don't you move to Russia or North Korea?

Lastly, I am writing to demand that you vote NO on HR 7661. This legislation is a dangerous, nationalized vehicle for book banning that threatens the very existence of our public school system.

By weaponizing federal funding, HR 7661 attempts to blackmail schools into adopting the bigoted, reactionary dogma of groups like "Moms for Liberty." This bill effectively erases LGBTQ+ students and replaces professional educational standards with partisan indoctrination. It is a financial hit job designed to starve schools that refuse to comply with extremist censorship.

Do not allow federal policy to destroy the lives of American children. Support intellectual freedom and vote against this overreach.