GOP has a new plan to kill off Medicare and Social Security

One of the least remarked-upon chapters in the Republicans’ ghastly Project 2025 document dealt with their plan to cut Social Security and Medicare, ostensibly to fix the impending trust fund shortfall and eliminate the national deficit all at once. The reason hardly anyone talked about it is that if there’s one thing we know about Republicans, from the so-called moderates to the most extreme MAGA true believers, it’s that they want to do away with those commie pinko programs once and for all.

But there’s a problem: Nearly all Americans depend on those commie pinko programs to some extent, including many Republican voters. So the ideologues are always forced to couch their desire to slash federal spending to the bone in some version of “We have to kill the programs in order to save them.” Nobody buys it, and the world moves on.

Indeed, in all three of his presidential campaigns Donald Trump ran on promises to protect those programs, and under his leadership, other Republicans have mostly kept their plans on the down low. Who can forget the moment in Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address when he declared that the GOP wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare? The Republican side of the room hilariously exploded in high dudgeon that he would even suggest such a thing.

Only a couple of months later, they were already forming congressional “working groups” to discuss how to cut those program. By the next year, when Project 2025 was unveiled, it was all there. Among other things, they proposed to raise the retirement age to 69 or 70, alter the benefit schedule and cut disability payments. They wanted to move toward privatizing Medicare entirely by making its already-privatized side program, Medicare Advantage, the default choice for everybody so insurance companies can more easily deny care and reap even bigger profits.

But that was just the latest attack in a long history. The Heritage Foundation has been putting out these policy blueprints for decades, and every single one of them features some harebrained scheme to degrade or eliminate the retirement programs. They’ve proposed letting younger workers “opt out” of paying into Social Security or collecting it, which would bankrupt the programs in record time. They’ve pushed for total privatization and means testing, which would break the universal compact.

Never once, oddly enough, have they suggested raising the cap on the maximum earnings subject to Social Security taxes. Asking wealthier people to pay payroll taxes on wages above $185,000 would fund the system long into the future. But of course, that’s the last thing Republicans want. The whole point of their years of endeavor is to end it once and for all.

We might have thought that Trump’s promises would at least have kept the jackals at bay until he’s off the stage. But it’s pretty clear that our president has checked out and only cares about revenge, monuments, prizes and grift at this point. If the extremists around him can get him to believe that he’s building his legacy as the greatest president in history by “saving” the programs with some new privatization scheme akin to his “Trump baby bonds,” he’ll do it in a heartbeat

In fact, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has openly suggested that the “401(k)s for babies” might create a road map toward the Social Security privatization effort that failed under George W. Bush. That was 20 years ago, when they were telling us that the program was doomed to “run out of money” before 2026. (That actually can’t happen unless the entire U.S. government “runs out of money,” in which case we have much bigger problems.) So the GOP is overdue for another run at this.

Well, it looks like they’re gearing up for it. House Speaker Mike Johnson said this to a conservative radio host this week:

The largest spending items, the reason we’re in trouble, are because over 74 percent of federal spending is on autopilot — mandatory spending, that is, your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and things like Social Security — they have to be adjusted and fixed. We have a plan to do that next year, and it’s critical because we’re at $40 trillion-plus in debt. At some point, you get into a hole so deep you can’t climb out of it, so desperate times call for desperate measures.

Maybe we could think about reversing some of those tax cuts for billionaires Johnson and Trump love so much. Or we could put a stop to Trump’s foreign adventures, which are costing the taxpayers untold billions. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted to approve Trump’s $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget last week, and Congress has appropriated $518 billion over the last year for the Department of Homeland Security to deport working people who are paying into Social Security with no prospect of ever collecting benefits. Maybe they could think about dialing back some of this reckless spending on wars and police actions that nobody wants and are making everyone poorer and less secure.

If the times are desperate, Mr. Speaker, it’s because the country is being run by people like you and Donald Trump, who seem determined to ruin it.

One might suspect Johnson knows that he’s not likely to be speaker next year, so there will be no legislation aimed at cutting the safety net programs. Their plan at this point is to maximally demagogue around the latest Social Security report, which says an impending shortfall of the Social Security “trust fund” — which is an accounting gimmick — will hit in 2032 or 2034.

That would effectively trigger a political crisis that endangers the program’s solvency, because that  “trust fund” is what allows the government to pay out Social Security benefits every year without a specific appropriation from Congress. If there’s a shortfall, as now predicted, Congress will have to make up the money. What are the odds Democrats will be able to do that, whether or not they hold a majority, without the draconian cuts Republicans are certain to demand? Imagine the government-shutdown scenarios that include older people not getting their checks. Given the extremist majority that now dominates the GOP, that’s a real possibility.

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Economist Paul Krugman explains in his newsletter that the shortfall is actually quite modest and easily accounted for — if the government exercises some common sense. This problem is actually temporary because members of the the massive baby boom generation are now largely retired, and their numbers will gradually diminish in the years ahead. As mentioned above, we could rethink this crusade to deport manythe workers who’ve been propping up the system for years, we could tax rich people on more of their income, and we could decide to do something about America’s outrageous income inequality, which is distorting everything.

Maybe we’ll do all of that this time around. But I’m not betting on it.

There’s a certain “boy who cried wolf” quality to the perennial alarms about the GOP’s lust to get rid of these big federal programs that go back to FDR’s New Deal (Social Security) and LBJ’s Great Society (Medicare). But make no mistake: The minute they actually get the chance to take them down, they will. There is no article of faith more fundamental to the American conservative creed than the premise that Social Security and Medicare are socialist programs that must be privatized or eliminated altogether. Even the fact that these are universal government programs, available to every American, goes against everything they believe in.