Misinformation in the Pursuit of Social Security ‘Reform’
“The money is ours, Mike Lee, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. You’re not going to get a penny of it.”
The most controversial parts of the (Project 2025) agenda for president-elect Donald Trump have an eighteen month window before midterm electioneering begins. While the incoming administration has scenarios mapped for doing end runs around the Congress, one item requiring approval of the legislative branch will be revising the benefits of Social Security.
The very idea of reforming the mechanisms for benefits to seniors and disabled citizens has come to be a ‘third rail’ in politics. Following a particularly successful reelection effort in 2004, the (GW) Bush administration made Social Security reform its top domestic policy goal.
At a post-election press conference, then-President Bush declared, “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” In mid-January of 2005, the White House had launched a public opinion mobilization effort, directed by Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, to build public support for Social Security reform.
The problem, as this Brookings Institute post mortem sets out, was that the more the administration’s people talked about it, the less people liked it.
By early summer the initiative was on life support, with congressional Democrats uniformly opposed and Republicans in disarray. After Hurricane Katrina inundated what remained of the President’s support, congressional leaders quietly pulled the plug. By October, even the President had to acknowledge that his effort had failed.
This time around there's a different game plan already in motion for selling reform, built on misinformation about the programs and tying it to the rising distrust of government that Republicans have tapped since Ronald Reagan.
Senator Mike Lee’s takedown of Social Security’s history is the opening act for this year’s attack on benefits, and it has already been shared on social media by shadow president and budget hacker wannabe Elon Musk.
Get this: Elon Musk, whose net worth is over $500 billion, met with US Senators, whose average net worth is $2.3 million and who make $15,000 a month with fully paid health benefits, to discuss cutting social security benefits to people who get an average of $1700 per month.
The Utah Senator’s screed starts with calling FDR’s effort to get legislation enabling Social Security passed a deceptive sales technique. Then it notes that “your money” goes into the “Social Security Trust Fund” that gets raided often for whatever the current Congress deems “necessary.”
It conflates “returns” on the Trust fund with investments in the stock market, suggesting retirees would be better off putting their money into private enterprise.
Trust fund investments are limited by law to Treasury Bonds, a move made to protect people from the likes of the 1929 stock market crash, which was still very much in the public consciousness in 1935. Yes, sometimes the market does better than government bonds, but there’s a reason why institutional investors and even brokerage firms park so much of their cash in treasury notes: it’s the safest bet they can make.
Sen Lee then pulls out the time honored reactionary claim that Social Security is a Ponzi fund, doomed to collapse.
Every dollar you pay into Social Security, only to see it gobbled up by the government itself, is a dollar you can’t invest in your own future. It’s government dependency at its worst.
Remember, this isn’t just about retirement. It’s about independence, about controlling your own destiny. With Social Security, you control nothing.
Next up is the claim that administrative costs/procedures are a problem. If “a problem” is defined by having costs lower than those charged by pension fund managers or a robust system to prevent fraud, then Mr Lee has a point. (Administrative costs are around 0.5% of annual benefits.)
Then he gets to the real reason for his pronouncements:
The history of the Social Security Act—which sadly must include the deceptive manner in which it was sold to the American people—is yet another reason why America’s century-long era of progressive government must be brought to a close.
Beyond the Senator’s pronouncements, there is a mythology about Social Security crafted by generations of guys who sit on barstools and claim to know things.
Below are a few pointers about this bullcrap regarding the introduction of Social Security under President Franklin D. Roosevelt you can be expected to hear this year:
“Participation would be completely voluntary.” When Social Security was established in 1935 as part of the Social Security Act, participation was not voluntary. Workers and employers were required to contribute to the program through payroll taxes
“Participants would only pay 1% of the first $1,400 of annual income.” The original Social Security Act did impose a payroll tax of 1% on the first $3,000 of annual income (not $1,400) for both employees and employers. Over time, this rate and the income cap have increased significantly to meet the program's needs.
“Contributions would be deductible from income for tax purposes” Contributions to Social Security have never been deductible from income for federal tax purposes.
“Contributions would go into an independent ‘Trust Fund’. Since 1968, the trust fund has been considered part of a "unified budget" system. While legally distinct, this arrangement means Social Security funds can be affected by broader fiscal policies.
“Annuity payments to retirees would never be taxed” Social Security benefits were not taxed until 1983 to balance out tax breaks for the rich and signed by President Ronald Reagan.
There is a sneaky way for the Trump administration to avoid a fight on Social Security: Do nothing. This would be a deliberate strategy to shrink Social Security by default, leaving millions of Americans with reduced benefits that kick in after the Trump administration is gone (If it goes). As he’s done with all the legal actions against him, this would be just running out the clock.
Having delved into the mythology surrounding Social Security, there are some true things that need to be considered:
Social Security trust funds will be insolvent by Fiscal Year (FY) 2034, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), at which point the law calls for a 23 percent cut in benefits. Restoring solvency over the next 75 years would require the equivalent of reducing all future benefits by 24 percent or increasing revenue by 35 percent.
Four key parts of the incoming administration’s agenda (eliminating taxes on retiree payment, no taxes on tips, high tariffs, and massive deportations) would shrink the window for insolvency to six years.
Restoring solvency would require the equivalent of cutting all current law benefits for current and future retirees by roughly one-third or increasing all current law taxes by roughly one-half. (For me personally, this would be a $600 decrease in monthly benefit)
Last year SS paid out $1.15 trillion (85%) to retirement benefits. $150.9 billion (11%) to disability benefits. $50.9 billion (4%) covered other benefits
About 67 million people, or about 1 in every 5 U.S. residents, collected Social Security benefits in February 2024. While older adults make up about 4 in 5 beneficiaries, the other one-fifth of beneficiaries received Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or were young survivors of deceased workers.
For about 50% of Americans over age 65, Social Security accounts for about 50% of their income. For about a quarter of those, it’s 90% of their income.
A majority of voters want to see increased Social Security benefits:
The obvious solution to Social Security’s revenue problem is to undo the provisions making $168,600 the cap for taxing wages. About 6% of wage earners make over that cap. Removing the cap means only those 6% pay more in taxes, covering about 65% of the Social Security shortfall over 75 years, and reducing the budget deficit about $300B/year or 20%.
If we wanted to make Social Security the program that most of us want to see, a small tax on wealth (since rich people don’t get that way via paychecks) would suffice.
This sort of solution would also address the shrinking workforce as it ages (unless the GOP is successful in turning women into baby factories). If wages are a lesser part of GDP, then whatever takes their place should be fair game.
There is a group out in the political landscape already fighting for Social Security, and it’s not the AARP. Social Security Works seeks to block the cross-party buy-in for these efforts, which would be used to diffuse the ultimate blame from voters.
Via David Dayen at The American Prospect:
Social Security Works, led by veterans of those fights, is warning about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the quasi-advisory organization co-chaired by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, which has the goal of cutting as much as $2 trillion from federal budgets. The organization sees DOGE as a Trojan horse to cutting Social Security and the two biggest public health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid
There are hundreds of informal caucuses on Capitol Hill, but given DOGE’s need for Congress to authorize most of its spending reduction proposals, and the fact that Social Security and health programs are among the only areas of the federal budget large enough to meet Musk and Ramaswamy’s goals, social insurance advocates believe these caucuses to be ground zero for any plots to roll back benefits, raise the retirement age, or other cuts.
“We’re calling for a boycott of joining the caucus,” said Alex Lawson of Social Security Works. Democrats should engage and talk about real deficit solutions, Lawson said, but signing up to a process that could cut Social Security without a commitment taking that off the table was unacceptable. “We need Democrats to come on board and put a stop to this.”
Talking trash about Social Security is about trying to turn the most successful part of our social safety net into being perceived as a failure. So it’s important to call out every misrepresentation about the program, and to note that the only winners in these reforms will be at the top of the economic ladder.
This is a declaration of war against seniors, people with disabilities, and the American public. The Republicans are coming for your Social Security, which they call a ‘nightmare.’ Elon Musk’s commission is a plot to destroy our Social Security by giving it to Wall Street executives — so that you get nothing and they get everything.
We’ve seen this play again and again. When Republicans destroyed defined benefit pension plans, they claimed that the market would be able to create amazing returns for everybody. Instead, workers got pennies, while Wall Street managers got billions. That is always the plan.
We will defeat this Republican effort to steal our earned benefits. The money is ours, Mike Lee, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. You’re not going to get a penny of it.”
American maternity care is in crisis. Abortion bans are making it worse. By Jill Filipovic
Abortions bans are tools of social control. The idea of these bans as “pro-life” doesn’t fit with the rest of the conservative movement’s views on life and health: Their support for the death penalty, their opposition to significant public health investments, their hostility to programs that provide health insurance to children and food for poor families. But these bans do fit with the rest of the conservative movement’s hostility to women’s rights:
Their support for blatant misogynists, their opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, their hostility to equal pay and equal protection laws, their fear of changing gender roles more broadly. The anti-abortion movement, remember, sprung out of segregationist movements which also couched their real agenda in the more palatable terms of state’s rights and parental rights. The conservative movement and the anti-abortion movement that resides within it have long demonstrated an utter lack of care for human life and wellbeing, and we see that manifesting in both the closures of maternity wards and in the criminalization of abortion.
Some of the various policies that have caused maternity wards to shutter may have come from different politicians and different eras than those that banned abortion. But they spring from the same worldview — and it’s not a life-affirming one.
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The rage transcends. As our institutions fail us, the specter of a more violent politics rises by Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine
The entrepreneur and tech thinker Anil Dash made a comment in passing on Bluesky that caught my eye: “It is good, at least, that so many disturbed young men will have learned, finally, that true infamy and endless online thirst posts don’t come from school shootings.”
This made me think of a few stories I wrote years ago, about a system designed by a radical anarcholibertarian from the first dot com era named Jim Bell. It was called an Assassination Market, and the idea was that once workable digital cryptography was invented, you could build anonymized marketplaces where people could bid on the execution of public figures. This, he believed, would be one of the only reliable ways to check politicians’ and public figures’ power. Bitcoin emerged as a workable digital cryptography, and oh ten years ago someone built one as a stunt. Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke, then the head of the Federal Reserve, were listed as targets, and someone paid up some bitcoin to make it seem real, and then nothing happened and all the bitcoin disappeared. Since then, a couple more iterations have popped up; some people entertain vague fears that such a market could, with the right conditions and proof of concept, tip into reality.
I’m not so worried about that, as much as the broader state of a society that has arced towards realizing something resembling an assassination market without much cryptographic engineering at all. The almost-plausibility of a world where killers select targets that will earn them the most online clout, if not crypto outright, and where people cheer in fury because their institutions have so utterly failed them and it is all they can do, that’s bad enough. Of course the politics of the enraged are not always coherent—read any post-election Trump voter exit interview, and that’s clear enough. But these recent targets have coalesced, somehow, nonetheless around the avatars of injustice. There are many more powder kegs lined up, and who knows which hand will set the spark.
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Destruction of Government by Elon (DOGE) by Gil Duran at Framelab
The first rule of framing: Never use the opposition's language. Remember: Their language imposes their framing. Instead, you must frame the issue from your perspective. This means using your words, not theirs.
Here's why I chose the frame of Destruction of Government by Elon:
First, this frame is true. It accurately – and directly – describes the situation.
Ok, that's pretty much it. When confronted with an Orwellian term that uses bureaucratic lingo and euphemisms to lie, always reframe them in the simplest and most accurate terms possible. Say exactly the thing they are trying to hide.
