Time to organize a mass movement in defense of Social Security and Medicare for all

Now that it looks like the President Trump and the Republican Congress will succeed in ramming through the most regressive tax bill (not “reform” bill as the media keep slipping into calling it) in the history of the income tax, it’s time to gear up for the real battle – a battle that calls for not more lame Soros-funded, Democratic Party-led “resistance,” but rather a deadly serious mass movement to defend and expand Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and what remains of federal welfare assistance.

The Republicans have made it clear that their claim that this tax bill, in slashing taxes on corporations and the rich, will “pay for itself” through supposed higher economic growth is bogus and that the real goal is to, as conservative strategist Grover Norquist once put it, “to shrink government down to the size that we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But make no mistake, the Republicans aren’t talking about shrinking the biggest drain on the federal budget – the military – which consumes 54% of each year’s discretionary budget. No, they’re talking about cutting social spending, or in other words the key elements still left from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This campaign will be based upon a lie which the corporate media tend to repeat uncritically: that Social Security is “bankrupt” and more importantly that it is the main cause of the nation’s $20-trillion deficit (soon to be a $21.5-trillion or higher deficit after the new tax law works its magic). In fact, Social Security benefits are, always have always been and will through 2019 continue to be fully funded by payments made into the program by past and current workers’ FICA payroll taxes. The program has over its 81-year history contributed exactly nothing to the federal deficit. Rather, that deficit is the result primarily of the nation’s massive military budget and endless series of wars and cold wars since the end of World War II, as well as to a gutless Congress that continually adds to to the red ink by refusing to fully fund government programs, preferring to borrow and push the costs onto future generations. (Truth to tell, Congress has since World War II cravenly used borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund to finance U.S. wars without having to raise income taxes to pay for them.)

The strategy for going after what Republicans scornfully (and Democrats ignorantly and lazily) deride as “entitlements” such as Social Security and Medicaid, are actually earned benefits that workers have, over their lifetimes, paid for with taxes taken from both their paychecks and from their employers, is to claim that the government just can’t afford these programs anymore.

It’s true that because of demographic changes and medical advances – a declining birthrate, a major increase in life expectancy, and the arrival of a massive wave of so-called “Baby Boomers” born in the two boom decades that followed the end of World War II – there is a bulge in the number of people reaching retirement age and eligibility for both Medicaid and Social Security retirement benefits. We know that is happening (the first Baby Boomers reached 62, the earliest age for claiming benefits, in 2007, and reached 66, the age of eligibility for what is known as “full retirement,” in 2011). That bulge in elderly citizens claiming benefits will continue enrolling for retirement and Medicare eligibility until the period 2026 through 2034, when the last Boomer babies, born in 1964, will be reaching, respectively, either age 62 or age 70, the latter being the age one can file and receive maximum monthly benefit checks. (Then, left unsaid, is the reality that the shortfall problem will begin to go away as older retirees in the bulge begin to die off.)

Coincidentally, 2034 is also the year that, if nothing is done by Congress to bolster the Social Security Trust Fund in advance, the Social Security System as currently established under the 1936 Act, will have to draw on just the FICA tax receipts from then current workers. That, we’re told, would mean cutting benefits by some 21%. That’s hardly going bankrupt, but it would be a hard blow for the elderly who depend upon only Social Security benefits to survive on, as they have no retirement savings and no pensions thanks to America’s poverty-level minimum wage and the termination of most traditional pensions. But the countries of Europe, as well as Japan and Taiwan, all face these same issues and have dealt with them, keeping their much more generous systems solvent. Here the story is different.

Ten years ago, this temporary shortfall in the Trust Fund and this predictable extra draw on the system’s resources because of the retirement of Baby Boomers could have been dealt with by a few simply tweaks, such as eliminating or even just raising the cap on income subject to the FICA tax (it’s currently capped at the first $127,000 of earnings). But Congress has refused to deal with such a fix, and longer allegedly people’s deliberative body waits, the more dramatic and costly that fix will have to be. Today, the shortfall could be eliminated by changing the law so that all income – even multi-million-dollar incomes – be made subject to the payroll tax, and by a few smaller tweaks, like adding a transaction tax of perhaps 0.25% to every short-term stock trade – something many countries in Europe (where retirement systems are much better funded) do. Or the amount employers pay into worker accounts could be raised from the current matching 6.2% to 7.2% or 8.2%.

Okay, so we know that Social Security and Medicare, two of the most popular programs of the United States government, are in the gunsights of Republican strategists. Ergo, now is the time to begin building a mass movement to not only defend but to expand those programs, which are actually among the most meager and inadequate of retirement and state-run health programs among all developed nations.

The first step is to begin a campaign to explain to the American people that Social Security and Medicare will not go bust as long as they fight to protect them. Despite the best efforts of conservative and neo-liberal ideologues to pretend that they are doomed by demographics and actuarial tables as if they were private annuities, Social Security and Medicare are in fact purely political constructs and benefits are set and funded by the decisions of elected politicians.

The second step is to explain clearly to all Americans that Social Security and Medicare do not simply benefit the old and the sick. They are there for every worker who becomes disabled or too ill to work anymore. Social Security benefits are also paid to support children when a wage-earning parent dies, or to a widow who may have earned no or only a minimal Social Security benefit while raising a family. Even more importantly, Social Security and Medicare also mean that children and grandchildren do not have to bankrupt themselves or short-change their own children’s future by having to impoverish themselve to support their aging parents and/or grandparents. If you think about it, what working-age person complains the benefit payments to their retired parents or grandparents being too high? And yet that is one of the more obscene tactics opponents of these programs have turned to: trying to stir up an inter-generational war over “entitlements.”

Marches on Washington and state capitals in this movement should not include just older people – they should be packed with young people demanding that grandma and grandpa and mom and dad get the benefits they’ve earned, and that these programs be there for them too, when it’s their turn to need them.

I would say that this movement I’m calling for should also be in defense of Medicaid – the federal/state program that funds medical care for the poor (and also for a huge proportion of the middle class when they need to move into long-term nursing home care), and of welfare for families of the unemployed and those who, despite working at prevailing minimum wages, cannot survive without financial assistance. But the truth is that these programs, as well as Medicare itself, should be replaced with some type of national health program for all, such as they have in the U.K. and Canada (and virtually all of Europe and much of Asia), and by a federal minimum wage that actually is set high enough to support a family on it (current minimum wages are so low that workers qualify for welfare programs like WIC and Food Stamps, meaning these programs are actually just taxpayer-funded payroll subsidies for greedy employers unwilling to pay their workers a living wage).

It’s easy to make the case that the U.S. has the most costly health system in the world by a factor of two, and still leaves nearly 30 million citizens uninsured and unable to pay to see a doctor, while other developed countries, at a fraction of the cost, have systems that cover all their citizens’ health care costs. It’s easy too to make the case that raising incomes at the bottom is the best way to raise all workers’ incomes since employers have to offer more to attract workers when less skilled workers start to receive more than those skilled workers are currently receiving. It’s a no-brainer.