At last night's Republican Presidential debate candidate Chris Christie called for means-testing Title II Social Security benefits, comparing them to Food Stamps. He also wanted to increase full retirement age, although he didn't specify how high he wanted to go. In addition, his challenger, Nikki Haley urged changes in cost of living adjustments.
As someone once said, "A program for poor people is a poor program." (By the way, who said that? I don't remember.)
15 comments:
The Pugs rather go after poor people because they don't have enough money to make political donations like corporations.
If you want to save money, let Medicare bid for all medications, which we already subsidized with taxpayer R&D funds.
If the program institutes means testing, then it will be attacked as a welfare program. Don't do it. Raise the cap with a corresponding raise in benefitsand and do a PSA about high earners voluntarily not taking their benefits. It happens.
People love to pretend means testing will enable them to protect programs from being depleted or becoming unaffordable. In reality, once means testing is implemented, only the poor care about the program’s viability, and everyone else begins to view the program as some sort of unfair welfare for lazy people, which of course they then want to defund and attach all sorts of strings to in order to bully anyone who might need it.
Chris Christie speaking from an affluent state. Wait until NJ constituents hit w/ more IRMAA . Does he really think he can get to 1600 pennsykvania ave w/ this kind of rhetoric ??
People forget that when you do means testing, you have to pay a bunch of people to test the means. More money goes to administration of the program than those in the program. Keep it like it is, you get paid based on when you earned when you worked. Raise the limit to be taxed for social security purposes. Invite the wealthy not to collect those benefits if they can afford it.
The Republicans will do anything they can to save Social Security if all it involves is cutting benefits. If anything is suggested to raise the necessary revenues by increasing the cap or raising the tax rate by a percent then they are in just say no territory.
Nice to be rich like Christy and not have to worry about it.
And I guarantee this proposal would not lower the FICA tax that funds Title II disability benefits. Christie is proposing that we steal funds from the solvent Title II program, and transfer those funds to the insolvent retirement system. This is not a serious policy proposal. It would also create a perverse incentive for the spouse of a Title II claimant to lower their own wages for eligibility purposes. Christie is forgetting that for some disabled persons, early Medicare eligibility is almost as valuable as the benefit payments. Not every disabled person is married to a spouse with good job based health insurance.
Sooo, raise the limit to be taxed and then ask them not to apply for their benefits?? Holy crap. I’m old enough to apply for retirement. I don’t need it but I’m damn sure going to apply for it at some point. I earned that money during my career, the government just took it for my future. Not for it to be distributed to low income people. That was a separate tax.
The problem isn't republican politicians. The problem is the people who vote for republicans.
Chris Christie's positioning as the anti-Trump voice of reason on that debate stage sometimes will fool you into forgetting he's just as much of an anti-government terrorist as the rest of them.
And if Trump hadn't essentially punked him out by making him go on McDonald's runs and openly mocking him, then Christie would have been perfectly happy with his spot in the Trump Administration.
It's not a moral stand. He's just a jilted ex-employee.
Just having a PSA for wealthy people who don't "need" to take their Social Security retirement just isn't going to cut it. In fact, in my experience, it's the weathly people who drool the most out of milking the system and lining their pockets. The only thing I can (quickly) think of would be giving some sort of tax advantage/credit for not taking Social Security, but even that would need serious thought. A 1:1 tax credit. A person could potentially still "file" at whatever age they want to determine their "benefit amount," but instead of getting payments from SSA, they would get a tax credit form/interface with IRS. So they would effectively lower their taxable income by the amount of money they would otherwise receive from SSA.
Taking the benefit, they might get $40k a year from SSA, which 85% is likely taxed at their normal rate- let's say...24% (Im just plugging in numbers here). So they "receive" about $25,840 in actual cash benefits after taxes... OR
A tax credit would effectively lower their income tax by $40k per year in retirement. They get a tax free $40k out of their taxed investment vessels to offset not actually "taking" Social Security. The gov loses out on some income tax revenue, but more money stays in SSA (potentially) for those who are more dependent on the system.
Again, this is a very broad generalized idea, but something like this (or similar) would need to happen rather than just a PSA of "you're rich, please don't take your social security retirement."
Believe it or not, there are people who do not have that mind set.
So wealthy people “milk the system and line their pockets “ by filing for a benefit they paid into?? Using that logic, poor people are milking the system by filing for disability benefits. Any logical person would admit that neither of these are true. You must not be very logical. Your idea of tax breaks for those who do not take retirement proves that.
Based on https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R47341.pdf#page=31 the top quarter of people age 65+ have household incomes around $95,000 and up. That group gets about $32,000 of their annual income from Social Security. Means-testing enough to reach solvency would go deeper into the income distribution than I think a lot of people realize. It's not as simple as cutting off Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
Instead of means testing for sick people who can't work, we need competence testing for people who can't govern.
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