The Rightwing Attack on Social Security Is Un-American
Rightwing ideologues are mounting a three-pronged fraud to delegitimize Social Security, slash its benefits, then—zzzzzt—kill it.
First, they tried to demonize our public retirement program as a socialist horror. That hasn’t worked, since this pension literally works, allowing millions of workaday American families to escape old-age poverty.
So, in Lie Number Two, they shriek: “Social Security is bankrupt—you future retirees will be left penniless in old age!” Uh . . . no. The bulk of retiree benefits are covered by payroll taxes, which continue to flow in, so the program is in no danger at all of folding.
Well, they exclaim in Lie Number Three, even to keep the program on life support requires gutting it by raising people’s retirement age to seventy or older and slashing monthly payments to retirees.
Uh . . . gosh, no again. Such a gut job would be immoral—half of America’s workers get no retirement benefits except Social Security. Plus, such callousness is totally unnecessary, because there’s an obvious, easy, and fair fix: Apply the Social Security tax to everyone!
While working stiffs pay this tax on every dollar they earn, millionaires and billionaires are taxed only on the first $170,000 of their astronomical pay. Take Elon Musk, the richest man in America, who claimed a $45 billion paycheck last year. But under current law, he only pays Social Security taxes on $170,000 of that—meaning $44,999,830,000 of his income goes untaxed. Why shouldn’t he pay like everyone else?
Tax everyone equally—the rich as well as the working class—so everyone can have a secure, dignified retirement. That’s what the American concept of the common good means.
Will Elon Betray Donald First, or Vice Versa?
Seeing two bloated egos like Elon Musk and Donald Trump hug up recently in their marriage of political convenience made me think, “Boy, there’s two who really do deserve each other!” The only question is which one will betray the other first.
My money is on Musk. Yes, Trump has built his entire career on the art of high-profile betrayals, from real estate scams to marriages. But Musk’s crass duplicity is even more naked (please excuse that image). He routinely shifts his core beliefs from one “rock-solid principle” to the opposite, coldly turning on trusting partners and allies, all for personal gain.
Take his 2022 denunciation of President Joe Biden’s climate change proposal, which promised massive support for the electric vehicles sold by Musk. Just a year earlier, the Tesla CEO had proclaimed himself to be “super fired up” about Joe’s plan. But his ego got ruffled by some perceived slight by Biden, so he called for killing the entire climate initiative, smugly declaring that Tesla didn’t need public money.
Ha! Far from being some bootstrap, up-from-nothing corporate genius, Musk is the fortunate son of a South African emerald dealer. He didn’t create Tesla, he bought it, then enriched himself by extracting giant subsidies from American taxpayers and ruthlessly cheating workers and suppliers. Tesla’s first factory was built with half a billion federal dollars, he has been milking a public regulatory fund for $9 billion so far, each car he sells gets up to $7,500 in federal subsidies—and he continues to draw about a billion a year in tax breaks from that Biden law he condemned.
Musk says it’s all ethical, because the money is there for the taking. Yeah—and so is his integrity.