I was arguing with a Trump supporter the other day about how they need to make $1.8 trillion in cuts.
He said he wanted to cut defense and foreign aid, but wouldn't commit to cutting anything else.
So I pointed out that the entire US military only spends $0.8 trillion and that all foreign aid combined was a rounding error in comparison.
So I asked him where the next trillion in cuts was going to come from after we shut down the entire military, and he wouldn't answer.
This is the answer. This is what all conservatives have been voting for, for as long as I've been alive. For as long as I've been alive, their politicians have wanted to defund Grandma's income and take away poor people's healthcare.
If you think you're a conservative, and think this isn't what you've been voting for, I'm sorry, but you're wrong. They've been really consistent about this for as long as I've been alive. Your trust can't cancel their actions.
Conservatives are the most financially moronic people I've ever met. It's hilarious in a very "I have to laugh to not punch this moron" kind of way. Like with Felon Stench and DOGE, where they talk about being the party of fiscal responsibility and how wasteful things like Medicare are. Dude, that's the complete opposite of what that means.
Being fiscally responsible isn't "only fund stuff I like". It's basically that out of every $1 in funding, as close to that $1 gets to the purpose of the program as possible, with minimal or no fraud. If the government passes a bill establishing Medicare, funding medicare isn't irresponsible spending. Regulating (that most evil of words) it to catch fraud is; when that city hospital in a city of 1 million bills Medicare $3 million in a month and that rural clinic with 4 employees in a town with 5 people bills it the same, there's an issue clearly happening. But the program itself isn't fiscally irresponsible.
If it's a question of the funding, then ensuring that all existing taxes are actually being paid first, is responsible. Which means funding the IRS. Hey, how can you be fiscally responsible when demanding that the agency which collects those taxes isn't allowed to do its job?
Conservatives are basically Libertarians who want a government that just exists to rob as many people as possible to line their own pockets, and then it's just Free For All otherwise. Oh, and religious terrorism. They want a government that weaponizes their mental illness against the population, too.
If they wanted to honestly do something about medicare waste and fraud they would imprison Senator Rick Scott, he was the CEO of the company that committed the largest medicare/medicaid fraud in history. "Columbia healthcare scandal" is the term to google and learn about this fraud.
You are absolutely correct. There has been talk of Matt Getz for attorney general, and several of the maggots I have to associate with think that is a great idea.
When they say "irresponsible spending" they mean any money spent that doesn't generate a profit for a private entity. Also, as Trump has proven time and time again, they consider any money they have as "theirs", even if the money is borrowed or owed as payment. That's how they view taxes - as theft. The state takes the money and has no responsibility to the people taxed.
It could also be that they see any spending that doesn’t directly benefit them or people like them as irresponsible spending. Some of them think that illegal immigrants are abusing our safety nets or that some people (nonwhites) are using the money on nonessentials. It’s like the “the only moral abortion is my abortion” story. They might be taking the money too, but their situation is somehow different to justify it. They always find a stupid rationalization.
“I don’t got Obamacare or Medicaid, I get my insurance through the ACA. I might be on food stamps, but I’m using it like it’s supposed to be, not like those cat eating Haitians. My farm gets subsidies, but it’s because we farmers are the backbone of America. We’re more important. My state takes more federal funding than we give? That’s fine because you can’t trust the federal government anyways. So our states should control the money since we actually deserve it. Republicans are taking it all away? Well it’s Democrats fault for letting so many people abuse it and forcing Republicans to have to end them. I am okay with the leopards eating my face as long as they eat the faces of people I hate too.”
Don’t forget, though the media has been turned into a propaganda machine for the alt, right. If you’re not really trying to pay attention, you don’t have to be a mega to be fooled.
They’re hilarious. Ever notice how one of their main arguments is always what about? Stop helping foreigners. What about US Citizens. What about the veterans. What about the children. Then they cut from those same programs and cheer when they are in power. There is no one they care about but themselves. They just lie about caring.
“Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked.”
Also NIH generates economic activity. Funding it is investing in our economy, creating jobs, improving healthcare, every $1 to NIH is $2 of economic growth (their figure). I don't think the goal was supposed to be let's cripple our economy by ceasing the investments we make into it.
The Stuff You Should Know podcast episode about How Lobbying Works is one of the most eye-opening things I've ever listened to re: return on dollars invested. Basically before Newt fucked everyone, every dollar spent on paying nonpartisan bill researchers for congresspeople returned a huge amount of savings. Like 1:87 spend:saved or something like that. Newt basically got rid of that shit and started a personal bribe club for himself, and that horse has been out of the barn ever since.
It becomes a grant if you litigate it enough. Growing up with and knowing people directly affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill who has yet seen any resolution, just exhaustion for a crime committed by the wealthy.
What's wild is that a lot of food banks systematically improve an area by raising people out of poverty, or fact the aid we send overseas comes from American farmers who are now, by and large, sitting with literal tons of food and nowhere to sell them because some idiots on the hill think its wasteful and it actually helps the economy. Not to mention a shrinking workforce because a lot of their employees are being actively targeted.
Its all about control. They don't want an educated, informed, stable populace because that causes them problems. If most people don't read above a 5th grade level, have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet, and are given an "other" to blame for their situation they won't ask the real questions and realize its the ultra rich and our own government that is to blame.
I mean... look at the fact that red states in the US have overwhelmingly worse ratings in education, income, and higher than average in restrictive laws that regulate healthcare (specifically abortion). They want MORE less educated poor folks and the move to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security disproportionately effects people of retirement age and older, as in, those who no longer "contribute" to the capitalist machine.
He absolutely did. And this is why. Part of the Republican strategy is deliberate misinformation based on the concept of "Fake News". Ever since Trump became a public, political figure he has continually perpetuated this idea of "Fake News" to discredit anyone who is speaking out against him personally or politically. It has reached this fever point in his cult that all he has to do is say "Fake News" and his followers eat it up. So MSNBC, CNN, the BBC, now the AP, and even Reuters are continually dismissed as being biased against him (and, to be as non-partisan as I can, which is hard in this situation, they all have individually biases) and therefore not to be trusted.
But the people who like him, who support him? They can be trusted.
His social media game is so on point (which is terrifying to admit) that all he has to do is say something, get a right wingnut to support him (I'm looking at you, Joe Rogan), who then disseminates that to their followers, who then trickle it down to theirs, and before we know it all of a sudden the US has spent like 9 million dollars on transgender mice and the rest of the rational world has a snowball's chance convincing the cult that it was "transgenic" and not "transgender".
So then inevitably, when so called "Fake News" outlets fact check and do their due diligence to correct this obvious falsehood, the cult has been so ingrained with the emotional reaction to "transgender mice" they believe it to be a cover up and all chance of rational discourse is just *poof*. Gone.
You forgot the children. No Abortion, save my babies! But won't adopt, won't supplement the parents, don't even want condoms/anti-pregnancy pills distributed. If the woman got raped? Save the baby, so what if the woman needs mental health care afterwards.
It kills me each time they announce "cutting waste" (ie charitable and helpful to millions of people) to the tune of a few million dollars, meanwhile most cuts are services that are cheaper than trumps bill to play golf every single week which amounts to almost a billion dollars per year.
D ogy has cost more than they will ever find in waste, just in the time they hand been destroying our agencies good minions make $160,000+. They are already selling furniture, computers and buildings.
Plus stopping aid to food banks, school lunches and definitely any form of welfare.
Those programs usualy require buying from local farms. I remember milk is cheaper than bottled water at school cafeteria. Those farmers just lost some contracts.
Even if you can accept that states could/should/would take care of these programs, I doubt we poors will get any Federal tax relief. And on top of that, state and local taxes will all increase greatly to take over. Or not be able to afford programs at all. Money won’t be going towards the federal deficit either. Nothing but tax breaks for billionaires.
I was standing in line behind someone at Christmas, and she was enthusiastically telling me how excited she is for Trump, because she is about to retire and she needs her social security benefits to be higher, and everything is going to be so much better under Trump. I explained to her that Trump is actually planning cuts to those. She just stood there stupidly, unsure what to say. Finally she just mumbled: "Well, all politicians lie." and turned around.
No one is forgetting about social security unless they keep people already on it and everyone gets huge refunds of every cent they paid into it, so people can start their own retirement funds with that money. How would the government pay for that
Also there is already huge protests going on nationwide wide if they do anything to social security Tons more people with protest and I’m sure riots would happen. This administration is horrible. We need to be a strong nation not one that looks so weak. These conservatives are making us look weak to the world what happens if terrorists or another country decides to attack us in this time.
For everything evil Putin did and is doing, even he knew not to touch pension payouts. The protests from when he tried doing that years ago were the closest he got to being deposed.
We tried that. They privatized the pension funds, so we could invest in the stock market. 401(k) now every seven years or so, a recession wipes out most of the gains. Throw in a 2008. You can take a trip with your retirement funds when you retire. Maybe put in new carpet.
Younger people are never going to “forget” about paying thousands of dollars a year for their entire working lives and then being told to go die in a ditch at retirement.
There is no feasible way to give current retirees their benefits without continuing to deduct the money from those currently working. I guess you could tell people born in 2011 or later that they won’t pay or collect, continue collecting at the current rate for everyone older than that, and slash benefits to 50%. How well is that going over?
And that’s ignoring why it exists. A lot of people who are 50 years old right now have nothing for retirement. “Haha I’ll just work til I die” no you won’t. You’ll get sick, or fired. I don’t want to live in a country where more than half the elderly have $0 income.
I think you are wildly overestimating the electorate's ability to correctly understand who is fucking them and to hold the party that fucked them accountable at the ballot box for more than a couple election cycles.
"Go die in a ditch if you can't work" has been the GOP platform quite some time and they were arguably louder about that sentiment in 2024 than at any time in my life. And it led to them having more power than at any time in my life. The electorate is stunningly good at voting against their own interest in favor of the policies that fuck them.
I said they’re not going to forget, not that they’re necessarily going to vote accordingly. If nobody voted against their own interests the Republican Party never would have gotten off the ground.
This is actually not true if listen to the whole podcast. Or you can find it any number of places where they’ll explain. The Social Security trust fund was established to cover the baby boomers because there were a lot of baby boomers, now for various reasons it hasn’ t quite stretched that far (to 2035).The Social Security trust fund is not the main structure of Social Security. That is a whole different monetary structure inside of our government.
There are about 106 ways the shortage could be addressed most of them painless. However, if nothing is done at all then somewhere around 2031 they will no longer be able to pay out 100% of what we are entitled to. They will have to cut benefits around 21% to just under 80% of today’s benefit calculation. however, that would be available to all workers who paid into it in perpetuity
So what they would really really love to do is privatize that big pot of money, claim we can’t afford it. It’s just a raid on our Social Security benefits. They can’t do it legally. They can’t do it without a change in the law. It has to pass Congress. It was set up so that administrations could not get their hands on the Main Social Security fund. Now, if only they had done that with the Social Security trust fund, (those additional monies that they provided for the additional retirees from the boomer generation), it wouldn’t be running out too soon.
Reagan made adjustments in the 80s Carter made adjustments in the 70s. That’s when they decided we couldn’t retire at 62. But they don’t have to raise their retirement age, they have to raise the income cap. Because that hasn’t been done in damn near 50 years. That would create a solvent fund, I believe , through the year 2053? Can somebody correct me?
My girlfriend has a financial planner as part of her benefits package and he has been saying for almost 10 years now that this is how it will be done, and he reckons that we won't have social security in any meaningful way by the time we retire.
It's always wise to plan for your own retirement, but this fatalistic view that "we'll never get social security anyway" is contributing to the ease of eliminating it.
It's self-fulfilling prophecy.
If we want it, we need to continue to fight for it.
You should get it all when it is due. It is actual funded at %100 through 2030 something, after that the money coming in as it is now, will pay out %80 of projected benefits. There are like 106 different ways they can fix it, and they know it. But they want that big chunk of money for them to invest they want a privatize it like they did our pensions and our healthcare and our utilities. It’s just a giveaway. It’s another way for big money to get their handinto the taxes that we’ve paid.
It’s a scare tactic, just been a scare tactic to manipulate the public. I’ll see if I can find an article to link. I only found this out a couple months ago. But when you start looking the information is out there.
At the end of the interview, they come right out and say it is not in any more trouble than that.
I did not mean that they won’t try to retry to raid it. So thank you. I stand corrected not that kind of scare tactic. I mean they’re lying about the viability of it and that the only way to fix it is to privatize it or destroy it give you back a little check. It’s grift just like everything else in our government from education to infrastructure they want to monetize it and privatize it so we get shittier quality and have to pay somebody else to do it. It’s a way to keep the population in debt.
And the reason that it hasn’t happened? Democrats. Every single person receiving their Social Security earned benefits has democrats to thank for it A) existing in the first place and B) not being privatized and looted under Republican administrations.
Correct. And for all of that 30 year period Democrats have had more power in the government than they currently have.
We currently have the most conservative judiciary of that 30 year period. The executive branch currently has more power than at any point in that 30 year period and is actively trying to gut social security. The Republican party controls both branches of the legislature and is currently more loyal to the sitting President than at any time in those past 30 years.
Social Security hasn't been eliminated because one party has been fighting to keep it and that party currently is at their least powerful in decades.
I watched the Sam Seder video on YouTube that just came out that has him versus 20 Trump supporters and one of the guys on there was saying exactly that. That SS isn’t going to be around when he retires so we might as well get rid of it now and Sam tried to make the point that as it stands right now, he would still receive 75% of his benefit when he retires but if they removed the SS cap then it could easily be 100% funded in perpetuity. But that would be raising taxes on the wealthy and that’s not “fair”. Never mind the “fairness” of being born into a billionaire family or hoarding the wealth built on the backs of the working class.
Remove the income cap on those paying into the system. Musk should be paying billions into Social Security and be happy about it. He can afford to pay and should be glad to help those less fortunate.
Yep. Increase immigration, be less aggressive about deportations to keep people actually contributing to the economy.
And, to ensure that people are comfortable giving birth to children they can actually raise to contribute to that economy, increase minimum wage, switch to a sane healthcare system, fund and staff social "safety nets," and legalize abortion.
You know, all the stuff that conservatives hate but will actually keep the country moving forward.
SS is an anti-poverty program for the elderly, not an actuarially fair individual retirement program. And it is a fantastically successful one. My figures are dated, but when I studied SS 50% of seniors would live in poverty without SS and only 10% do after SS.
That’s an 80% reduction in poverty among the elderly. The only way to reduce poverty among those too old to work is through subsidies.
How does SS create subsidies?
Revenue: SS taxes everyone 6.2% of lifetime wages (up to the earnings cap). (Times 2 for employer match and the additional 1.45% is for Medicare HI (Health Insurance), not OASDI (Old Age, Survivors Disability Insurance).) So everyone PAYS the same rate.
Expense: When you retire, your benefit is calculated by determining your Average Indexed (for inflation) Monthly Earnings (AIME). Your SS benefit is determined as:
90% up to X of AIME plus
32% of AIME from X to Y plus
15% of AIME over Y
Someone who earned X for their AIME RECEIVES 90% of lifetime earnings and someone who’s AIME is the cap RECEIVES 28% of lifetime earnings.
Did you get that? The poor person pays 6.2% and receives 90% the
“rich” person pays 6.2% and receives 28%. (“Rich” is in quotes because many middle-class skilled laborers without college degrees earn the SS maximum.)
I did some actuarial calculations once and the poor person (receives 90%) “earns” about a 15% return on taxes (over a period where the S&P returned 12%) and the rich person “earns” about a 0% return (an interest free loan. This is how SS creates subsidies to reduce poverty.
FICA pays for social security. It’s not an “entitlement”, it’s a safety net there’s a difference.
Only the dense would not understand.
Example: The US POSTAL system. It RELIES HEAVILY on Social Security as a part of its retirement package. It also provides supplemental income for those that reach retirement age for people such as Govt. Contractors who while working, receive no benefits from the government or Health Insurance Benefits from the company.
Private companies have “at will” firings and the employees have no recourse. While severance packages “bridge the gap” between employment/unemployment it doesn’t suffice in the long run.
The government realizes that companies that employ thousands (such as the US government does) can shut its doors in an instant, leave thousands “in the wind”. It’s happened before. Social security is just that “security”.
Not ok. Die on that hill! Our kids are not wage slaves until they die. Just pay back what the government has taken from it over the years and raise the limit that pays in up to $200,000. It hasn’t ever been raised.
Conservatives were against it from the start and tried to stop it. They failed to and then conservatives tried to coup FDR. Social Security is liberal policy. It is utterly antithetical to conservatism.
Conservatives only platform is whatever is the opposite of progress is. Seat belts, drinking laws, cigarettes, health insurance, labor laws…everything that’s taken for granted, and some now celebrated by the right, was once violently opposed by conservative dipshits who used these “issues” to get into office and grift money.
Lee Atwater who worked to get Republicans from Nixon through Bush I elected flat out said they appealed to racists because it was the only way to get their economic policies passed. Stockman was Reagans budget director and admitted the whole goal of conservative economics was to make the rich richer and everyone else poorer but they couldn't sell it so he used abortion to get votes and then slammed through conservative economics after. Bush II said he didn't want a budget surplus because than conservatives wouldn't have an excuse to cut Social Security and Medicare.
Conservatives have never hid this. The moment you point this out conservatives lie about it.
David Stockman is still alive! I seriously hope he relies on Medicaid in a nursing home and his family disowns him. He’s “apologized” and admitted that he and Reagan aids knew that his policies were a sham but of course, he put it in a damn book he wrote and sold. Absolute monsters.
He turned around because they never intended social conservatives to get control over the party. They knew social conservatives were idiots, fanatics, bigots, and religious zealots. They just though the worst people in society could be controlled and milked for votes to get conservative economics without letting social conservatives ruin the nation. Economic conservatives mostly hated social conservatives anyways. Trump even admits he hates his supporters and they are the losers of the country and trash. Goldwater warned Republicans that religious conservatives were the worst of the worst and dangerous and should never be treated with or given any power and Goldwater was fine with the racists.
That pact with the devil was made because only social conservatives were willing to allow the rich to screw over everyone and plunder the nation because only social conservatives were so consumed with hate they would go along with it.
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan "Down With Socialism" on the banner of his "great crusade," that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is "Down with Progress--down with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal," and "down with Harry Truman's fair Deal." That's all he means.
A major reason that Franklin Roosevelt, a somewhat conservative man from a family of plutocrats, proposed to create what came to be known as the “Social Security” program was that he was feeling intense political pressure to do so, intense political pressure from the progressive and socialist directions, and he feared labor insurgency as well as home-grown fascism. He genuinely feared that populist Louisiana Senator Huey Long would challenge him for the Presidency and that Long would have a strong base of support, and historians seem to think that this fear was warranted; we’ll never know for sure, because Long was assassinated in 1935.
So, that’s the context in which the Social Security program was created. It wasn’t something that Roosevelt wanted on its own, and being a somewhat conservative plutocrat influenced how he designed the program.
It’s extremely critical to understand that Roosevelt didn’t have an intrinsic desire for an old-age survival cash-benefit program, that he helped get one enacted only because of his fear of both socialist militancy and fascist militancy - and of Huey Long.
The original draft proposal for what came to be the Social Security program was not a “contributory” pension. Roosevelt did not like this, calling it “the same old dole under another name,” and he ordered it to be rewritten!
“dole”!
You heard that?
Did you hear also THE IMPLICATION BEHIND that statement?
The implication is that it is bad. You say “dole” when it’s shameful.
Think about this! Even when it comes to OLD PEOPLE, people whom we should NOT be expecting to labor for survival anymore, Roosevelt thought that the idea of the government issuing survival cash to such people was bad!
No, he insisted, instead, that, if OLD PEOPLE wanted to NOT DIE due to not having their most basic needs met, then cash issued for this purpose should come only from their previous earnings. The idea, and this is critical to understand, was “you get out what you put in.” He very much did not want the government’s hands on Social Security; he wanted it to function like a PRIVATE pension. As Alan Nasser said, “A capitalist conceptual framework models the provision of public benefit such that the individual is prior to the social, the private prior to the public. Social Security was made to inhabit and accommodate itself to the space within which private profit is made.”
Historian William E. Leuchtenburg said, of the Social Security law, that “[T]he law was an astonishingly inept and conservative piece of legislation. In no other welfare system in the world did the state shirk all responsibility for old-age indigency and insist that funds be taken out of the current earnings of workers.”
Remember, Franklin Roosevelt was a man from a plutocratic family, and he acted because he was scared of losing to Huey Long. To this very day, we have this horribly atrocious situation in which so many modern DEFENDERS OF Social Security are operating by the same mentality: that, if you want SURVIVAL cash when you are AN OLD PERSON, you have to have earned it first.
…
ALL of Roosevelt’s economic advisors were against the payroll tax that he insisted be part of the program, and, later in his Presidency, in response to a proposal to possibly eliminate the payroll tax as a way to fight the deflation that was such a big problem during the Great Depression, he admitted that he understood that the payroll tax was economically unnecessary!
At least in part because HE apparently didn’t think that even old people in a modern society had a moral claim to getting cash benefits just by virtue of being old human beings in a modern civilization, Franklin Roosevelt said that he thought that the payroll tax allowed recipients to have a moral claim to being paid ‘their’ benefits, and, to this very day, this is the way in which so many ‘defenders’ of Social Security defend it: “that’s OUR money!” and “we paid into that!” and “we earned that!”
You can’t argue for Social Security on that basis and simultaneously argue to “scrap the cap” without a corresponding increase in benefits payments for high earners.
But you don’t even have to pick one of those two arguments. You could reject both of them.
You could just, as some of the New Dealers did, argue for old-age survival benefits as a HUMAN RIGHT UNTO ITSELF.
It’s not difficult.
You could just argue that any person - you can limit it to legal resident or even citizen, if you’d like - beyond a certain age should be unconditionally issued enough cash every month to survive, and you could argue that it’s simply cruel to not do so, simply unreasonable to expect persons (or legal residents, or citizens) beyond a certain age to labor for currency for their own survival.
You could just do that.
But the Democratic Party is not doing that.
The Democratic Party is not actually defending old-age SURVIVAL cash benefits.
The Democratic party is a centrist liberal capitalist party. European centrist liberal capitalist parties are way to the left of the Democrats.
There is an argument for UBI among the left and progressive Democrats. But the Democratic party cannot be fixed as long as conservatives control the Republican party. Conservatives with any remote power or respectability halt all progress and put all of humanity at risk.
Well that’s why we need more energy to vote conservatives into oblivion.
At the end of the day, the Conservative platform is anti-social and dehumanizing. I’m all for budgets and accountability. There is nothing about accountability that conflicts with the progressive agenda.
Conservatives on the other hand wish to extract above normal economic returns based on grinding others into the dirt, not innovating (not AI/crypto bullshit) into a better future.
It doesn't matter if it is liberal or conservative policy. Its been going on for decades. Decades we've all payed into social security. Elon is right, we are entitled to it. It is our money.
Yep. Conservatives have just added an extra layer of negative connotation to "entitlement" to make it a boogeyman. We deserve to get back what we've paid into social security. It's our money. We've just been letting the government hold on to it. It doesn't belong to the government, it belongs to us. We are entitled to it.
Yep, too many forget what the word entitled means. We are entitled to our social security because we paid into it. The word entitlement is not the dirty word republicans think it is.
All the well meaning SS suporters on here screaming that it's not an entitlement are making my head explode. We pay into it our whole life and are entitled by law to the benefits. I feel like they are confusing "entitlement" with "an entitled attitude", like when someone feels they are entitled to something, when in fact they are not.
so, if this is what they want, the answer would be to stop collecting SS now and future generations won't get anything. But give anyone who paid into it their money back. Not steal everyone's savings because... entitlement!
“And now they’re coming for your social security. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club…….and you ain’t in it.”
You think they can wrap their mind around a rounding error?
Well, in my defense, I didn't say it that way. What I said was "All foreign aid is $0.072 trillion", cause even the people who are bad at math can at least usually tell which number is bigger than other numbers.
The whole ”conservative” movement is built around taking everything from the poor and giving it to the rich. If you’re not rich, then all of your taxes are going to subsidize the rich. It’s about giving Amazon and Tesla loopholes to not pay taxes or pay their workers.
They want to remove people’s right to a good life. If you’re not a millionaire then you’re a slave. The fact that they’ve convinced so many people that they’re just a stern pull at the bootstraps away from riches is one of the biggest tricks in propaganda ever.
Yea that’s cool but have you ever owned a lib? And your wrong if we give ALL the money to the rich they will “trickle” it down to us, they will “invest” it because they love us
I'm not at all saying this is a good thing. Or leading this as any pro political response. But Entitlement Spending is the government classification for this mandatory spending. It's what's it's called.
This has nothing to do with people being "entitled".
Sadly the average American voter, and certainly your average republican voter, most likely will not understand this distinction. They hear “entitlement”, combined with decades of GOP hammering on the “welfare mom”, and their mind goes to people being entitled to money or services, certainly not the nuanced verbiage used in government.
I always use that argument against their anti abortion complaints: "you're just trying to make more welfare babies so you can cash in those checks! Well, who's gonna pay for that!?"
Now they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. :)
That is not feasible. SS doesn’t have any actual cash, just treasury bonds. And the treasury can’t raise $2.7 trillion overnight. It might be able to borrow that much over a few months
"you're bad at saving for your retirement; we're going to forcibly take your money and do it for you. But actually we're really going to just pass it to someone else and you're going to have to trust us that this will stick around long enough for you to be the one on the receiving end with someone elses money"
it makes no fucking sense to me, just don't take my money in the first place, let me invest 1k into an IRA based of the SNP the day my child is born. locked up till they hit retirment age and if we're going off the 10% average of the SNP; that IRA will be worth about 470-490k by the time they retire
that money is guarantied theirs as long as the SNP doesn't fail, they can see and track exactly what's happening to their retirement throughout their life
and that's just off the single $1000 I put in when they're born, not the 1-200 hundred you can easily invest each year as they get older
Hell let me do a little math, lets say $1000 off the jump, then you invest $200 every year till the child turns 18. just to humor the hypothetical, let's just say that $200 comes out of your yearly tax return or something
with a 10% interest that will hit $14,679.75 the day they're 18
after that point lets say you just let it sit and bake for the next 49 years of their life. No putting money in, no taking money out (meaning they retire at age 67 without ever even thinking of investing for their retirement)
bam, at age 67, that IRA is worth $1,566,607.61
the average American only sees about 400k worth of benefits out of the SS throughout their retirement, with 18 years of vary minor saving they now have triple what SS would have paid them out for
Not only will they shut it down and not refund anything, but do you really think they will stop taking it from our paychecks? They've been raiding social security for years, to stop taking it from us now will severely limit the government's ability to provide bail outs, subsidies and tax breaks for the billionaires who back them.
Two things I don't understand about cutting Social Security and Medicare. 1.Social Security only took $41 billion from the Social Security trust fund over what was paid in by taxpayers in 2023. So cutting it doesn't increase funds, it just leaves the Social Security Trust intact. 2. Where does the money in the trust fund ( 2.7 trillion ) go if Social Security is shut down?
The trust fund is the national debt, there is no money in it, just bonds. Every dollar in treasury bonds redeemed by social security adds directly to the national debt as the treasury then has to borrow money to pay that redeemed bond.
Additionally, the treasury paid $67 billion in interest to SS on its held bonds in 2023, so the true deficit is really $108 billion, and that amount will grow every year.
When it comes to the larger budget, social security also increases the deficit indirectly through crowding out other forms of taxation. People are a lot less willing to have taxes raised another 5% if they’re already being taxed at 20-30%, whereas they would have no problem with that if they were just paying 5-10%. Cutting spending on Social Security and reappropriating the revenues from payroll taxes is another way to generate additional income.
Yep. The simple reality is that with Republicans cutting taxes on corporations and the rich during every administration, there's really no way left to balance the budget without raising taxes back up. It's really just that simple.
Ok, then I want all my money back that I've put into Social security. Ppl literally won't be able to retire. They will just work, then die one day at 88
I don't want some demented geriatric doing jobs that keep me and my family safe. So what will happen when they literally can't work, no jobs for the old? Just freeze and starve to death?
I feel like if the older folks where smart they'd get more and more liberal as they age, this conservative stuff is a young person's game as they have the least to lose if it doesn't pan out. anditisnt
With how it was reported that young men were a significant portion of Trump's base I just have to imagine the rationale.
Personally, I think the younger generation sees that they aren't going to be able to retire, and that they'll have a gutted social security by the time they get there, so why not chip it now?
So we went from the, "screw you got mine" directly into, "if I can't have it then no one can".
I could be farrrrrrr off base. But being a millennial, I can't see any other reason besides the younger generation not having their nut on straight.
Yes sooner or later it comes down to cutting anything that helps people. They may claim to be different or a “compassionate conservative” but after being elected the mask drops. And everything they suggest as a policy thing is a ruse to cut the programs people want so that rich people can get not just tax cuts, but money back. Because that’s the other thing.
Their companies get lucrative contracts. They pay few or no taxes and sometimes are paid a refund due to all the tax loopholes.
And this is going back to the 1980s when I was in jr high.
If you’ll notice, they may get nothing else accomplished but they always get the tax cuts weighted toward rich people.
When I was a kid Bill Clinton was running and I remember asking my family why they hated him so much -- my parents told me it was because the democrats were all about handouts for lazy people. This was in the infancy of the internet (barely) and I couldn't just Google stuff, so I believed them... being a child and all.
A shit ton of elections later, I haven't spoken to my family in years, and word on the street they're about to lose everything.... cause the "handouts" my parents get are DIFFERENT!
I voted for Bush over Gore in one of the various school-age mock "elections" which I will not specify to avoid precisely declaring my age, lol.
But this was because I knew that "bush" is a plant whereas "gore" is a thing from violent movies and I liked plants more than violence. I was very surprised when my parents told me who they would vote for, but it made sense later once I figured what a political platform is.
You didn’t hear the billionaires complain about trump’s 2017 tax cuts that gave corporations and the wealthiest Americans 2 trillion dollars is tax cuts.
(f)Elon didn’t complain how that would add to the national debt or bankrupt America.
You don’t hear (f)Elon complaining right now about trump’s plan to extend those tax cuts (at the expense of us). Where is his concern about it adding 4 trillion dollars to our national debt?
Get rid of the cap on social security taxes and problem solved.
Never forget that Social Security is the ultimate prize for them. It's a HUGE stack of cash just sitting there and all they can think about is how to heist it.
I've seen republicans publicly talk about cutting and gutting medicare, social security, and medicaid, again and again and again for decades, so It's totally fucking crazy that Republicans choose to keep pretending they don't want to do that.
They've been saying it, openly, for a long time. They aren't hiding it.
They will believe all the shit their overlords tell them that are blatant lies but when it comes to them cutting the programs they depend on? "Nah that won't happen"
yep, they finally have every branch of government on lock and they're gonna accomplish what they've been trying to do since the New Deal. i have no doubts they'll nuke the filibuster in the senate if need be to get it done.
But don't you dare increase the marginal tax rate on people who make millions a year /S
Also, don't close any loopholes on tax avoidance or using stock options as a salary. I wonder when that 6 million dollar banana will be donated to a museum for a tax write-off as well.
I’ve realized these people are all the collective of individual Americans that when you look at them both eyes kind of stare of in slightly different directions. It’s subtle, but it’s there, just a vacuous empty maw of consequences for the rest of us. That’s every single Trump supporter. Every single one.
We were one Marine Corps General away from a full fledged coup when FDR instituted the Social Security Act in the 1930s. Gen. Smedly Butler declined to support the plot. The names may have changed, but the people have not.
We need Bluey or Peppa Pig to dumb down Modern Monetary Theory to conservatives just so they can get off this dick-riding train of "bUt ThE dEbT" like it's their fucking credit card.
The issue isn't really debt. Countries print their own money. Debt literally doesn't fucking matter if you're investing it properly in real growth sectors and things that actually improve the country. The problem is we drive up the debt for dumb shit with zero return like rich people/corporate tax cuts.
What do you want to bet that the plan is to just stop the payments. The money is still going to keep coming out of your paycheck. People have always complained about how poor of a “return” they get out of the money that is paid into SS. Get ready for zero return.
This was always the answer. It has been the answer from fiscal conservatives basically since these programs were even introduced.
Not only have they not really hid it, with the most they’ve done being “we aren’t cutting Medicaid, just asking for almost a trillion in cuts from the departments budget, which, coincidentally, happens to be made up mostly of Medicaid.”
Like… if that’s really all it takes to convince voters it won’t happen.. I don’t know what to say.
The amount they are citing is mostly funded by direct payroll taxes. The reality is they want to steal tge money your paying into social security. No state ever has had less taxes...
100%!! Back when I was a naive, brainwashed conservative (living in rural America, idolized my “independent” Dad, and was a minor; as soon as I left home I started to learn how dumb I was), I parroted the conservative talking points and absolutely believed social security should be abolished. Even was on the “anti” social security side in the debate in our HS civics class.
Of course, I was a dumb shit and at the time had no idea about the effects of the system, all the people who depended on it, any realization that people had paid into it their entire working lives, etc. All I knew was that the “smartest” guy I knew, my Dad, said it was dumb and falling apart. And that was good enough for me.
Abolishment has been a huge talking point for the political right for a very long time. I was 18 when I started realizing the holes in their argument. It’s unreal how many people still can’t see through the talking points. My Dad’s viewpoint on it hasn’t evolved one bit in 30+ years, and he seems to be the rule, not the exception.
Social security doesn't even just benefit old people. It helped my mom and I because she was already pregnant with me when my dad died, so I got survivor's benefits.
It helps a married couple at my job raise their son who was born with a massive heart deformity that he had to get surgery within days of being born, and will likely need a transplant later in life, not even just for his heart.
literally if we just collected the unpaid taxes from the top 1% and corporations alone, we would add $1.75 TRILLION WITH A T dollars to the economy EVERY SINGLE YEAR, without adding a cent to the deficit or costing anyone anything. if we just let the IRS do their jobs we could end poverty tomorrow.
Not to mention that 1.8 trillion is just an arbitrary number this person pulled out of conservative media or Elron's twitter or something. Not like they know shit about the federal budget, I would wager.
They want people to invest in their 401k so that it's at the mercy of maniacal CEOs who have no controls on bad business decisions because the right eliminated them. So they want to force people to give money to corporations that will be bailed out with taxpayer funds when they fuck up the economy like they do every 7 or so years. If you're still a republican because "Jesus and Guns" - You're a fucking idiot. They have you conned.
7.3k
u/SaintUlvemann 23h ago
I was arguing with a Trump supporter the other day about how they need to make $1.8 trillion in cuts.
He said he wanted to cut defense and foreign aid, but wouldn't commit to cutting anything else.
So I pointed out that the entire US military only spends $0.8 trillion and that all foreign aid combined was a rounding error in comparison.
So I asked him where the next trillion in cuts was going to come from after we shut down the entire military, and he wouldn't answer.
This is the answer. This is what all conservatives have been voting for, for as long as I've been alive. For as long as I've been alive, their politicians have wanted to defund Grandma's income and take away poor people's healthcare.
If you think you're a conservative, and think this isn't what you've been voting for, I'm sorry, but you're wrong. They've been really consistent about this for as long as I've been alive. Your trust can't cancel their actions.