Tag: Social Security cuts

Trump’s Budget Director Reveals Plans to Attack Social Security and Medicare

Mick Mulvaney, Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP

Americans will not be fooled into allowing Mick Mulvaney to make what he deemed “easy” cuts to earned benefits.

Opponents of Social Security and Medicare are so eager to end these two overwhelmingly important and popular earned benefits that they can’t contain themselves. Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the latest to make crystal clear the longstanding plan to destroy both programs.

Speaking at a conference of state legislators hosted by the anti-government American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”), Mulvaney just revealed that he plans first to go after what he sees as more politically achievable cuts. He explained that the next step, presumably after Trump is in his second term, will be for the administration not just to cut these programs but to end them as we know them.

Mulvaney is apparently so eager to go after our earned benefits that he threw the point into a speech to state legislators, even though both Social Security and Medicare are federal programs.

View the complete November 30 article by Nancy J. Altman on the Common Dreams website here.

Mitch McConnell Calls for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid Cuts After Passing Tax Cuts, Massive Defense Spending

After instituting a $1.5 trillion tax cut and signing off on a $675 billion budget for the Department of Defense, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that the only way to lower the record-high federal deficit would be to cut entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said of the deficit, which grew 17 percent to $779 billion in fiscal year 2018. McConnell explained to Bloomberg that “it’s a bipartisan problem: Unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.” The deficit has increased 77 percent since McConnell became majority leader in 2015.

New Treasury Department analysis on Monday revealed that corporate tax cuts had a significant impact on the deficit this year. Federal revenue rose by 0.04 percent in 2018, a nearly 100 percent decrease on last year’s 1.5 percent. In fiscal year 2018, tax receipts on corporate income fell to $205 billion from $297 billion in 2017.

View the complete October 16 article by Nicole Goodkind on the Newsweek website here.

Media fell for Trump’s spin that cutting Social Security isn’t really a cut to Social Security

The following article by Craig Harrington was posted on the Media Matters website May 23, 2017:

Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

Trump promised not to touch Social Security during the campaign, but some reporters reframed that broken promise for him

A number of usually reliable reporters were duped by White House spin that President Donald Trump’s draconian budget proposal for fiscal year 2018 to slash spending for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) was not a violation of his major campaign pledge to protect Social Security from cuts. Continue reading “Media fell for Trump’s spin that cutting Social Security isn’t really a cut to Social Security”