Resistance report, Trump plans to end Social Security

Resistance Report
 KEVIN WALLACE APRIL 10, 2017
http://resistancereport.com/class-war/trump-social-security-plan/

As the Trump administration prepares to roll out its tax reform plan, one proposal the White House is mulling could destroy Social Security forever.

According to an early morning report from the Associated Press, President Trump’s new tax plan may propose drastic cuts to — or the outright repeal of the 12.4 percent payroll tax that funds Social Security. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initially defended the payroll taxas the cornerstone of an agreement between the U.S. government and American workers, that as long as a worker paid a portion of each paycheck to the Social Security fund, they had the full right to draw a pension when they retired.“We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions,” Roosevelt said in 1935. “With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

The plan is likely to be marketed as a means of putting more money in the pockets of working-class families, with lobbyists claiming that a worker making $60,000 per year would keep an additional $3,720 in take-home pay. However, leading Social Security advocates say the repeal of the payroll tax is a trap. Social Security Works President Nancy Altman told Talking Points Memo’s (TPM) Alice Ollstein that eliminating the payroll tax would fundamentally endanger the entire prospect of retirement for generations to come.“[Republicans] will sell it as a tax cut for the middle class, but really this is undermining middle class economic security, and the ability to retire,” Altman told TPM. “They’ll say they’re ‘saving’ Social Security, but basically they want to scale back or get rid of the program.”If the plan to eliminate or scale back the payroll tax is successful, it would essentially mean that Congress is responsible for appropriating funds to keep Social Security solvent. With no payroll tax to support the longstanding retirement program, members of Congress would have unprecedented power to decide whether or not Social Security lives or dies in the future.

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