We are hearing a lot from some very prominent people about Social Security.
Social Security is insurance for which we pay premiums. If you are receiving Social Security, it doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat or a Republican. It should arrive, like clockwork, regardless of whom you voted for.
Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933. He created “The New Deal”, which all of you remember from history books, or maybe you are old enough to have lived throught part of it. Social Security was created as part of that.
20 years later Republican Dwight D Eisenhower became president. At a time when Senator McCarthy from Wisconsin and J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, were raising alarms about communism, Eisenhower could have taken that opportunity to dismantle the New Deal. A lot of Republicans were pressuring him to do that. He was, after all, the first Republican President after 20 years of Democrats in the White House. But he made a point of keeping Social Security and the New Deal. He saw this not as “communism” or “socialism,” but as a matter of human decency. He even tried to get Universal Health Care passed through Congress before Barack Obama was even born.
Eisenhower also, as a Republican, created and implemented the largest Public Works program in American history. Some today might call it “socialist” as it took tax dollars to build public infrastructure. Today we call it “the interstate highway system.” It used to be that if you wanted to go from Chicago to California you had to “Get your kicks on Route 66.” Now you can take the George Washington Bridge at one end of Interstate 80, take it through Chicago, and stay on until you crossed the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. That was Eisenhower, “redistributing wealth” as some people today might call it, taking our tax dollars using it to create this massive interstate highway system.
This was at the same time that the highest marginal tax rate in the United States was 90% – under a Republican President. If you earned over a certain amount, the government kept 90% of it and you kept 10% of it. So there was an incentive to defer income to future years, like pensions, in order to reduce the tax on excessive income. And these were Republicans as well as Democrats, working together to make the country stronger.
This brings me back to Social Security. Many of you already receive Social Security. Whether you voted for Biden or Trump, either way you have been receiving Social Security if you were over a certain age, some of you for well over a decade – or two. You know who you are.
Social Security is not an “Entitlement.” It is insurance for which everyone living today has paid premiums out of paychecks year after year. Every single paycheck, or self-employed dollar earned, up to a certain amount that goes up every year, has 6.2% of it taken out as premiums to pay for Social Security. Your employer matches that 6.2%, and if you’re self-employed that makes you both the employee and the employer, so you have to pay twice as much. which is 12.4%.
Those are insurance premiums. If Social Security is in fact an entitlement at all, it is because you are entitled to the proceeds of the insurance that you paid for.
And it doesn’t matter if you are a liberal or a conservative, or even if you are a communist, or even a fascist at heart. Ideology doesn’t matter, If you paid those premiums, then you are entitled to the benefit. Your political beliefs have nothing to do with it. What matters is that you paid those premiums to receive your insurance benefits.
Elon Musk (who may or may not be running DOGE, depending on whom you ask and when, and which may or may not be a government agency, depending on whom you ask and when) went on Joe Rogan’s show and announced that “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi Scheme of all time.”
It is not a “Ponzi Scheme.” It is insurance. It is no more of a “Ponzi Scheme” than the casualty insurance premiums that is paid by Tesla dealers that in turn paid those dealers as compensation for the damage done to their cars and property. Insurance is a way if spreading risk among the many to help the few who need it. Does that make casualty insurance “socialist”? No, it does not.
As with all insurance, the amount of premiums may go up to cover the amounts to be paid out. Actuaries figure these things out. As Eric R. Brisker, finance department chair of the University of Akron’s College of Business, put it, “Social Security is a transparent, legally mandated, government program that can remain solvent through adjustments to both funds flowing into the system and flowing out of the system.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said recently, “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month — my mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t,” Lutnick told All-In Podcast hosts David Friedberg and Chamath Palihapitiya on Thursday. “She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.”
That’s our new Commerce Secretary. How is that possible? If you are receiving Social Security now, be honest. if you didn’t get your check, you would notice, wouldn’t you?
“A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining,” he added. “Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the processes, who knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen because whoever screams is the one stealing.”
If you complained because you need the money and it did not arrive, would that make you a “fraudster”? I think not.
The only “fraud” regarding Social Security is if some billionaire found a way to stop the payments. You have paid premiums all of your adult life into this “Old Age Insurance.” To stop payments that are legally due to you, THAT would be fraud.
