epublicans reacted raucously last week when President Joe Biden relayed one of the most basic, fundamental truths about American politics during his State of the Union address: Republican politicians want to cut Social Security and Medicare. The word “liar” could be heard during this section of the speech multiple times, and the camera panned to several Republican members with looks meant to portray bewilderment (presumably, some of them are gunning for Oscar nominations).
A hit dog will holler, and that’s exactly what the hollering was about during the state of the union, as well as the continued protestations after the state of the union from professional conservative opinion-havers.
We know that all the cries from politicians and the commentariat amount to the hollers of a hit dog because we can just look back at their proposals and see them! They haven’t been able to memory hole their plans to cut these programs – they’re all easily accessible.
Most concretely we can look at the proposal put forward only a year ago by the Republican Study Committee (RSC). The RSC is not a small, marginal group. They are the largest caucus of Republicans in the House – 156 members to be exact, nearly three times the size of the more notorious Freedom Caucus. What do they propose? For Medicare, they propose increasing the eligibility age from 65 to 67. For social security, they want to raise the retirement age from 67 to 70. Working people can intuit that this means a cut – after all, if the payments come later, that means in the final analysis they get less. But just how much less? In real terms, “raising the retirement age” to 70 for social security just means a 20% cut in benefits. Raising the eligibility age for Medicare to 67 means saddling 65 and 66 year olds with thousands of dollars more each year in healthcare costs, and would ultimately mean Americans spending more on healthcare, because while the federal government would save money, it would only do so by shifting the burden to elderly individuals, employers, and Medicaid, which are all less efficient than Medicare.
More radically – some want to completely get rid of these programs. Republican Senator Mike Lee, from Utah, said in 2010: “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it… People who advise me politically always tell me it’s dangerous and I tell them, ‘In that case it’s not worth my running.’ That’s why I’m doing this, to get rid of that. Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort, they need to be pulled up.”
Much more common for politicians is the refusal to directly answer questions while revealing their intentions to anyone paying attention. Back in October, Kevin McCarthy refused to “predetermine” whether or not Social Security or Medicare would be on the table in debt limit negotiations, although he has since taken them off the table.
This behavior is not anomalous. Conservative Republicans have always been opposed to these programs (like any program that helps working people). For the American Prospect, Richard Eskow notes that Republicans claimed the effect of these programs would be like the “lash of the dictator” while they were being debated. This tradition of likening programs that support working people in their old age to despotism was continued by Barry Goldwater in his 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative.
Anyone living in the real world can see these arguments are foolish. Far from restricting freedom of our seniors, these programs have brought and kept millions out of poverty. Before Medicare and social security, roughly one half of seniors were poor. Today, that number is 10%, but without these programs, elder poverty would again shoot up to nearly 40%. Ask anyone that has been both poor, and not poor, under which set of circumstances they felt more “free,” and you will have your rebuttal to the arguments of Goldwater and company. Similarly, support for these programs is higher than almost anything else we poll support for.
Now, I don’t want to paint a misleading picture. While the only real champions for these programs have been unions, elder advocacy organizations, and occasionally Democrats that are pressured by their base – Democratic politicians have also locked arms with Republicans to attempt to damage the programs. In fact, no less than Biden himself was playing the role of a fiscal hawk in the 70s, saying that we should freeze federal spending including Medicare and Social Security (and yes – this would mean a cut). Most recently, Obama was willing to execute cuts to the program, but Republicans at the time – thankfully – were too stubborn to take yes for an answer.
Fortunately, working people have pushed back enough that cuts to these programs are verboten for Democratic politicians (although they must be watched carefully, as Democrats routinely show their willingness to sell us out if the going gets tough and we aren’t able to muster enough pressure). Meanwhile Republicans, as illustrated above, are very much still interested in pursuing these cuts, even if they have been maneuvered by Biden into committing to taking cuts off the table for now.
Some people will try to dress up cuts as the only way to save these programs. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong. (They’re wrong.) But then they’ll say that because these proposals are the only way to save these programs, they are therefore not cuts.
This is nothing but sophistry and lies.
Advocates for cuts could advocate for these positions without lying to us. This sort of thing happens all the time. Your doctor may recommend amputation (a cut, to take the analogy further than it needs to go) to save your life. Just because the amputation is the best course of action, doesn’t mean it’s not a cut. If your doctor tried to convince you that an amputation wasn’t a cut, you wouldn’t listen to another thing the quack said, and you’d walk out. Union bargaining committees may recommend accepting concessions in a contract for the long term financial health of their employer, or because they don’t have enough leverage to win more. Good negotiating committees tell their members straight what the pros and cons are. Bad ones will lie to their members and try to convince them that concessions aren’t actually concessions.
I also want to be clear that because of the way social security and Medicare are structured, there will be issues in the coming years. Specifically, in 2034, left alone Social Security payments will be cut by 23%. Beginning in 2028, Medicare will only be able to cover an estimated 90% of hospital insurance costs.
So we should have a conversation about the best way to ensure the continuity of these programs. And fortunately, contrary to what the advocates of austerity would have you believe – cuts are not the only way to ensure they continue without issue.
Just this week, Senators Sanders, I-Vt., and Warren, D-Mass., in the Senate and Representatives. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Val Hoyle, D-Ore., in the House reintroduced the Social Security Expansion, which would not only maintain the current level of payments, but increase them by $2,400. How do they do that? By simply lifting the cap on social security tax on income over $250,000. This will ensure the solvency of social security for seventy five years even with the added payments. It will also not raise taxes on anyone making under $250,000, while ensuring it is no longer the case that a Wall Street CEO making $30M pays the same amount into social security as a small business owner who makes $160,000.
For less drastic measures, we could simply change the way that social security is structured so that instead of automatic cuts when funds run low, we could automatically raise the cap by as little as possible on income that is subjected to social security taxes.
Similarly, there are a number of proposals that would allow Medicare to cut spending (by, for example, negotiating drug costs) and increase revenue (by, for example, increasing taxes on people and corporations that disproportionately benefited from the pandemic) without forcing Medicare recipients to pay more for care.
So let’s have that conversation! But to do that, we must be able to be honest about it.
The honest assessment of every single Republican proposal to “reform” social security is that seniors get less. The beneficiaries of these plans are the wealthy who get their taxes cut or don’t have to pay new ones, not the average American. And contrary to what Republicans and even some conservative Democrats would have you believe, when they propose working people get less in their old age, they propose a cut.
A version of this article initially appeared on AL.com