This morning, my colleague Nancy Altman and I had the chance to testify before the Senate Budget Committee in support of expanding Social Security. I worked hard on my testimony, but unfortunately, I was cut off before I got the chance to finish it. I wanted to share the full thing with you, below.
Thank you, Chairman Sanders, for holding the first ever Senate Budget Committee hearing on expanding Social Security.
In 1935, Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. And for the next 87 years, Social Security has never missed a single payment.
Everybody loves Social Security. Everybody. I have been all over this country talking about Social Security and I can tell you it doesn’t matter if the crowd is filled with camo NRA or the parking lot is filled with electric vehicles. Everyone loves Social Security.
Well, not everybody, there has always been a tiny splinter group, a vanishingly small number of people who hate it with every fiber of their being. These are Wall Street men.
They see the trillions of dollars the system has put in the pockets of the American people and say, “hey! I want that money in my pocket instead.”
And as there are money men who hate Social Security, there will be politicians willing to say how high? At their commands to jump.
The first, was named Alf Landon in 1936 he ran against FDR on an explicitly anti-Social Security platform. He called it a “hoax” and a “fraud,” filled with worthless IOUs that would never get to the people.
And yet 87 years later Social Security is still here making payments every month like clockwork to the 70 million people today who have earned it.
While Alf Landon is forgotten to all except as the guy who lost 48 states when he ran against Social Security.
For the next few decades the majority of Republicans understood Social Security as a birthright and cornerstone of economic security for all Americans, not a partisan football.
My favorite is President Eisenhower in a letter to his brother saying this:
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security …you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things….. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
But unfortunately that greedy splinter faction never stopped plotting. And that faction today has taken over the entire Republican party.
Ronald Reagan was possibly the last Republican president who was not totally under their sway. And he stated with perfect clarity, “Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit, Social Security is totally funded by the payroll tax levied on employer and employee, if you reduce the outgo of Social Security that money would not go into the general fund to reduce the deficit, it would go into the Social Security trust fund, so Social Security has nothing to do with balancing the budget or lowering or erasing the deficit.”
But the splinter group has patience and money, lots of money, and politics loves money. So after the 1983 reforms they began waging a new type of war against Social Security. The main tactic being lying to the faces of the American people about what they are doing.
So now you will never hear from Republicans that they want to destroy Social Security, you will never hear that they want to cut benefits. In fact they always start their assaults on Social Security with protestations of love. “I love Social Security, I am just worried it isn’t going to be there.” The goal is to undermine confidence. To rob people of the security of knowing that Social Security is going to be there for them.
They cloak their attacks under new monikers. George W. Bush called for just handing our Social Security to Wall Street so they could gamble it away, he called it “privatization,” but again it is just destruction. Imagine if George W Bush had given our Social Security to Wall Street in 2006 just 2 years before Wall Street collapsed the world economy, and 401ks became 101ks. But this wasn’t a George W. Bush production, the entire Republican party was complicit.
And Senator Ron Johnson said as recently as 2015 that it was a “shame” the Bush plan to destroy Social Security didn’t succeed.
Senator Lindsey Graham, who supported the privatization effort, has proposed a bill cutting Social Security benefits by 21%. He hides that policy by saying he is “raising the retirement” age.
And he is not an outlier in his caucus, the Republican Party platform from 2016 says with coded language that the plan is to cut benefits and hand over Social Security to Wall Street, “As Republicans, we oppose tax increases and believe in the power of markets to create wealth.”
Senator Romney recently tried to get an up or down voice vote in the dead of night on his so-called TRUST Act, which would create an undemocratic, fast-tracked, closed-door process to cut Social Security. They know it is so toxic to talk about what they want that they tried to legally create a smoky back room where they can figure out the best way to rob people of their earned benefits.
Which brings us to the current Republican agenda as set out by Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee Senator Rick Scott. I will have to give this plan faint praise, because at least it has a hint of honesty about it. Senator Scott’s plan would “sunset” Social Security in 5 years. Rick Scott is the modern day Alf Landon, he hates Social Security and wants to eliminate it. But even he isn’t brave enough to say that and calls it “sunsetting.”
In fact, the Republican who was most honest about Republican plans on Social Security was former president Donald Trump, who as a candidate said from the debate stage, “Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security…And it’s not fair to the people that have been paying in for years.”
He said that over and over again, breaking the Republican pact to not tell the truth to the American people about their plans for Social Security. And he won. Now of course once in office the splinter faction got a hold on him as well and he spent his single term in office attacking Social Security from all angles.
There is only one number that I think should rule the discourse in DC about Social Security, $18,457. That is the average Social Security benefit. I am proposing that we make millionaires and billionaires pay the same rate on all of their income just like the rest of us and then we can expand Social Security’s modest benefits.
If a politician wants to take any of that meager benefit away, I welcome that fight, but be honest about what you are proposing. And be prepared to lose.
P.S. While SSW has been focusing on the hearing that Nancy and I testified at, tonight the House Special Committee on January 6th is unveiling their investigations. We’ll hear from witnesses and see brand new footage of the attack on the Capitol. Starting at 8pm ET, you can watch them here, or on any channel except Fox News.
