Now that the election is over, it’s time to look at the policies that Donald Trump, the newly elected president, talked about during the campaign and how they would affect Americans, especially those that have to do with Social Security.
During Trump’s first term in office, no real steps were taken to strengthen the program. He has promised to protect it, but he hasn’t said what specific steps he will take. He did talk about two policies that might hurt the program and the seniors instead of helping them.
Proposals to change Social Security
A lot of ideas have been put forward to try to save Social Security from the long-term shortfall that will happen no later than 2035. Last year, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he would create a debt commission, but supporters said it might hurt some people.
This isn’t the only idea that was quickly thrown out. There have also been plans to raise the retirement age or cut benefits, but neither of them have been approved.
When he was running for office, Trump even said that there were many options. “There are many things you can do about entitlements, including cutting them, stealing them, and not managing them well.” There are a huge number of things you can do.
That’s what the public and the media took it to mean, though. His campaign clarified that he was actually talking about how wasteful the program was. In fact, Trump made it clear that he would not raise the retirement age or make cuts.
His platform said, “FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE,” but it didn’t say how he would deal with the program’s debt and the benefit cuts that come with it.
Some changes were made to Social Security during Trump’s first term as president, but Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a former public trustee for Social Security and Medicare, says that data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office shows that the changes were not very important, even though they were said to save billions of dollars.
Blahous talked about what he thinks will happen in this second term: “The most likely scenario is to avoid, delay, and evade the problem.” That would make it even more likely that the country would not have enough money for the next presidential term.
This may sound bad, but it’s better than what could have happened. One of the proposed changes was to get rid of taxes on Social Security. If this happened, it would drain important tax money from Social Security’s trust funds, and they would run out of money by 2031, three years earlier than planned. Also, benefits would have to be cut by about 30%.
His campaign didn’t hold back when it spoke badly about the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. This was a nonpartisan government watchdog that worked with the Congressional Budget Office to get most of the data.
Karoline Leavitt, who was the campaign’s national press secretary at the time, said in a statement, “President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history and put Social Security on a stronger footing for generations to come by unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies.”
She also promised that seniors would no longer have to pay taxes on their Social Security benefits. They also said that the watchdog has been “consistently wrong over the years.”
The Tax Policy Center says that the people who make between $63,000 and $206,000 would benefit the most from his proposed tax cut.
This is because their share of after-tax income would go up the most. Like always, people who could benefit from bigger paychecks won’t see any change in their finances because lower-income people are already not taxed on their benefits.
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