GOP Blocks Bill To Give Grandma $2,400 More A Year
Bill would also keep Social Security solvent another 75 years. Can't have that!
Correction! This post was originally titled “GOP Blocks Bill to Give Grandma $2400 More A Month,” and it was Rebecca’s fault. The correct figure is of course $2400 more a year.
One of the biggest concerns we all have, with regard to Social Security at least, is whether we’ll ever get any. Republicans have been stoking this fear for decades, trying to gin up support for privatizing it all, and refusing to fix the shortfall it’s been running since 2021. The trust fund itself is expected to be insolvent by 2033 or 2035, depending on who you ask — which would lead to retirees only getting some of what they paid into the system (estimates are they’d get around 79-83 percent of what they’re owed). That’s not great! Especially when you consider the fact that half of all Americans age 55-66 have no retirement savings at all and will have to rely entirely on their Social Security checks to get by.
Scary, right? Except the thing is, it’s actually entirely fixable — or it would be, if Republicans didn’t suck so much and actively want it to fail.
On Thursday, the Social Security Expansion Act was reintroduced in the Senate by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and in the House by Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) and Val Hoyne (D-Oregon). The Social Security Expansion Act would not only keep the Social Security trust fund solvent for the next 75 years, it would increase benefits for retirees by $2,400 a year.
“Now I know in a world here in Washington, where the government is now run by billionaires, $2,400 doesn't seem like a whole lot of money,” Sen. Sanders said on Thursday. “But if you're trying to get by on $15,000 a year, you can't afford to heat your house, can't afford to buy a prescription drug that you need, $2,400 is something that will help.”
Sanders noted that 25 percent of seniors are actually living on $15,000 a year. I will also note that the average 70-year-old gets $2,081.42 a month in Social Security benefits and 40 percent of seniors are living on Social Security alone. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the United States is $1,557 and the average monthly cost of an assisted living facility is $5,676 per month (and that is not covered by Medicare, although your granny in a nursing home very well might be on Medicaid).
So how would we pull this off? Would we have to kill all of the billionaires and steal their money? Not even close! Right now, people only have to pay Social Security tax on up to $176,100 of their income. This means that someone who makes $20 million a year pays the same amount in Social Security taxes as someone making, well, $176,100 a year. This bill would not make them pay Social Security taxes on the whole $20 million, it would simply raise the threshold to $250,000.
The Social Security tax is 6.2 percent, which means that those making over $250,000 a year would have to pay a whopping $4,581 more a year than they do right now. (Unless they’re self-employed, so if they are, double that to almost $10,000 a year.)
That’s it. Literally, that is all we would need to do, and we could all stop worrying about whether or not we can keep Social Security going for the next 75 years and increase current benefits by $2,400 a year, $200 a month. Is your head exploding? Would you like it to explode more?
Because after Sen. Sanders gave a stirring plea for the Senate to pass the bill, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) got up and blocked it.
In his response, Crapo lied his face off, insisting that it was Sanders who was lying about Republicans cutting Medicaid benefits, insisting that they are only going to be cutting “waste, fraud and abuse.” Now, the budget that was just approved by the House a few days ago cuts Medicaid by $880 billion over the next 10 years. Does Crapo seriously believe that those cuts will only be to “waste, fraud and abuse”?
He also claimed that he never heard anything about defunding community health centers, despite the fact that Sanders explained that they are largely funded by the Medicaid payments of those who use them. Oh, and Crapo claimed that it was a lie that Republicans were trying to cut taxes for billionaires when all they were trying to do was prevent taxes from going up, which would happen if the Trump tax cuts expired, and that this would affect regular Americans as well, because Trump cut their taxes as well as the taxes for billionaires. If only it were possible to just pass legislation that only cut taxes for people making under a certain amount of money!
This was all the big work up to Crapo’s “reasoning” behind opposing the bill, which wasn’t a reasoning at all, just a statement that Republicans and Democrats have “competing ideas” about how to make Social Security solvent and that this solution hasn’t been discussed enough or had any Republican sponsors. Oh, and it would raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year, which he notes that Democrats promised not to do. In actuality, that was something Joe Biden, not Democrats as a group, promised not to do. I think most of us feel just fine about people who make $250,000 a year paying about $4,500 more a year so that we can keep Social Security solvent.
Maybe we can do something like those Sally Struthers commercials to get them in the mood for it, hm? For the cost of one Bottega Veneta Sardine Bag a year, you too can help America’s senior citizens not starve to death! I bet you they’d go for it. And if they don’t, ask them how much they’d like to see tent cities full of Golden Girls everywhere they go. Probably not too much!
If Mike Crapo and the Republicans really feel they need to discuss this more, then they should do so, instead of outright ruling it out — especially when their previous plans have included things like privatizing Social Security and raising the retirement age from 67 to 69. This is clearly the least painful and safest solution for everyone in this country, and refusing to even allow a vote is a clear sign that Republicans do not give a shit about anyone but the rich.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
WHOOPS! FACTCHECK: you mixed up "month" and "year" in the headline!
If we removed the cap on earnings subject to Social Security tax, and applied it to "unearned" income as well, we could dramatically raise payments and also cut the percentage rate of the tax.
I say this as someone who has earned above the cap, and who has to pay both halves of the tax because I'm self-employed.
And if we raised the payments, recipients would pay more of the sliding-scale expenses they have, including income tax. They'd receive fewer other services we all pay for. States would seize less of those people's property when they have to go into long-term care. It would pay off bigly, as those people spend all their income locally.