Come on
Yes, they are coming for Social Security:
The Trump administration is preparing a plan that would make it harder for older Americans to qualify for Social Security disability payments, part of an overhaul of the federal safety net for poor, older and disabled people that could result in hundreds of thousands of people losing benefits, according to people familiar with the plans.
The Social Security Administration evaluates disability claims by considering age, work experience and education to determine if a person can adjust to other types of work. Older applicants, typically over 50, have a better chance of qualifying because age is treated as a limitation in adapting to many jobs.
But now officials are considering eliminating age as a factor entirely or raising the threshold to age 60, according to three people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions.
And here we were told Donald Trump would never touch Social Security.
Russ Vought’s made a big deal of the fact that he’s not going after Social Security. But, of course, he is. He was too smart to put it into Project 2025 in an election year. But that project didn’t spring up out of nowhere. It was sponsored and run by the Heritage Foundation, the long-time conservative think tank.
Back in 2022, they put $22 million into hiring people from many different organizations to put it together. One of them was Vought, who has been affiliated with Heritage since 2010. (He worked at their lobbying arm Heritage Action as VP from 2010 through 2017.)
The Heritage Foundation has been leading the charge to eliminate Socal Security and Medicare for decades now and they haven’t changed their minds. And if you don’t believe that a slash and burn wingnut like Vought isn’t for it, you aren’t paying attention.
Here’s an excerpt from a conversation between Heritage president Kevin Roberts and Vought from 2023:
Kevin Roberts: Thanks for that. A related question. And that is on social security and Medicare, agree fully, it’s not part of the conversation now. But for our audience members who find it a little frustrating, and for some of them more than a little frustrating, that we’re not even allowed to talk about it at this time. Explain the tactics behind that, but also at what point do you think from a policy and political point of view, the conservative movement does need to be talking about that?
Vought: Sure. And I would just say I’ve supported all of these reforms. I’ve been a part of writing them for senators and members of Congress. So it’s not that I don’t think that they’re a problem, it’s that political capital is a finite resource, and that we lose, and I believe we’ve lost for many, many decades because we have not been careful stewards of political capital and thought carefully about the fights that we want to have, and need to have to base as statesmen should the most critical fights that we would need to have.
So we put forward a budget and they were modeled after our budgets at OMB where we have 9 trillion dollars in spending cuts. A third of that is discretionary, woke and weaponized bureaucracy, and two-thirds is mandatory. We do not touch the benefits of social security and Medicare, not because they are not actuality unsound and they are, but because I actually want to get to the point where we someday get to reform those because the American people have come along and been part of cutting the easy stuff, then the less easy, than the somewhat hard, and then the stuff that requires a lot of a conversation about.
And my view is just the kind of view from the diner. I’m the son of union workers and so I process everything politically from the diner. You’re going to try and tell me that after I’ve been paying into social security and gave the federal government a surplus for decades, you’re going to tell me that’s the first thing we cut as opposed to the Bob Dylan statute in Mozambique or the LGBT activist in Senegal? Really that’s the first thing you’re going after? Because they’re not paying attention on the day-to-day. They’re seeing the narrative. What’s the fight about going across the TV screen? What what’s being talked about in that diner? And they’re saying, “Does DC care about me?” And they’re saying, “After the surplus is that you squandered on the bureaucracy. You didn’t put it in investment accounts in the 2000, you put it in the Department of Agriculture, in the State Department foreign aid. And that’s going to be where you start?”
And so my view is you start where the threat is the greatest and then you build a culture of spending cuts and restraint. You get people committed to a goal of fiscal balance is important, and then you will get to a point where you can actually deal with these big immovable spending. I look at it the way a family does. When you have a fiscal excess in your family, you don’t start with the big stuff. You start with the entertainment and the out to eat budget. And then you start to think about, all right, let’s refi the mortgage. I think that’s a credible political strategy that I think we would have more success with. And at the end of the day, I would just say the other side’s been tried, my side’s never been tried. Can we just try something else that hasn’t led us into a fiscal cul-de-sac?
Roberts: And it seems as if your comment about political capital being finite, which is so true, bears out here because if you follow this chronological approach, it’s incremental, but each step is incrementally harder. Not only are we building as a movement, but also as a country, which I think you’re begging for the muscle memory of having these subsequently harder conversations. But the political leaders on the right who are willing to message on that and genuinely govern that way while their political capital is finite if they just put it on the shelf, because there’s a half life there, they actually can accrue more because of increasing trust with the American people and their colleagues. We haven’t tried that either.
Vought: Right. No, and I don’t think people should stop working on these things. We need paradigm shifting policies everywhere. The question is for those that are getting inserted into a live fire exercise as it pertains to the debt limit, and I’m suggesting that we prioritize it accordingly.
He’s just prioritizing, you see. Once people see the glorious Christian nationalist Phoenix rising from the ashes of the American republic they will be thrilled to eliminate their benefits.
Yeah right. The reality is that he figures that once he solidifies presidential power to do anything they want (including maintaining that power by any means necessary) they will then be able to finally end every government program that benefits people. And part of that seizure of power is to stun the American people into paralysis by stripping them of any feeling of agency over what is happening to them.
Don’t believe me? Here’s that famous quote again:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains… We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma”.
It’s not just the bureaucrats. He wants the American people to be traumatically affected so we will succumb. He’s a cruel, sadistic man in an administration full of them.
