MAGA Wants to Destroy Social Security. Here's How.
Recent social media activity indicates a likely strategy being undertaken to undermine the popular entitlement program
by Jeremy Novak
On December 2, Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee posted a thread on Xitter from his personal account that was critical of Social Security. Using tired modern conspiratorial tropes about murky “Deep State” origins and deceptive politicians, he suggested that Social Security was not so much a good faith method of providing a safety net for low-income seniors, but a bad faith attempt to control the population through dependence on government.
The thread was then almost immediately amplified by Elon Musk, garnering 18 million views in 12 hours:
It’s not just a coincidence that Musk is one of the main advisors on a quasi-governmental committee called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and is pushing Xeets like this further out into the public domain.
Musk and his anti-big-government ilk are frothing at the mouth in anticipation of dismantling the administrative state. And it doesn’t take long for someone to realize when looking at the balance sheet of the administrative state that there are really only three main areas where something approaching a “dismantling” can be initiated: defense, interest on debt, and entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, etc.).
Going after wasteful pork barrel spending might sound good and can be easy to sell, but in reality, cutting the funding of things such as studying the effects of dung beetle saliva on dandelions, or for building a playground in Owensboro, KY, is not going to have any tangible effect on the administrative state.
Where to cut?
To his credit, Musk is smart enough to figure this out. But a fiscal warrior’s path from here narrows even further. You can’t stop paying the interest on the debt without defaulting and creating major economic damage, which is hard to convince people is an acceptable practice and consequence. So that’s off the table.
You could cut the defense budget, but as with pork barrel spending, the things you can cut that don’t actually reduce our ability to defend our country won’t make much difference. And outside of those things, it’s political suicide to suggest that we make ourselves militarily weaker and less safe by lowering costs on things that are actually effective.
So that leaves the entitlement programs. These have also been traditionally politically untouchable, but there have always been undercurrents of hostility towards these programs that keep them on the table. This is bolstered by the fact that they truly are in need of some kind of reform, as they are not capable of continuing as-is. Some kind of tax hike or benefit reduction will be necessary to keep them funded.
So it’s not so much politically beneficial to discuss reforming these programs, but politically necessary. They won’t survive if they are not somehow adjusted.
Rabid fiscal warriors tend to want to reduce the size of government, so they favor reducing benefits versus raising taxes. But the challenge is that there has to be political will to reduce benefits. You have to convince the population to be willing to experience hardship to make it happen.
New attitudes
Cue the Elon Musk/Mike Lee Xitter collaboration I noted above. Due to the election results and perceived “mandate” they achieved, now is the time to squeeze what they can out of Trump’s political capital. This public pronouncement was their first attempt to inject anti-entitlement sentiment into the electorate’s bloodstream to turn them against these programs and accept the pain of reduced benefits.
Using the combined modern attitudes of contempt of institutions and distrust of politicians, Lee takes today’s political atmosphere and applies it to the 1930’s. In so doing, he leaves out important context, like the fact that America was in the middle of the Great Depression, and that it was an era when big government was accepted and expected.
Lee argues that the whole concept of Social Security was based on fraud because the government sold it to the country as a much-needed social safety net using people’s money to fund their own retirement. He says the government then argued later in court that the money was technically a tax and under the control of the government, not the individuals paying into the program.
Apparently, America had to be tricked into giving itself an old-age benefit, which is according to Lee is an example of unforgivable “Deep State” deception.
Never mind that these types of legal versus political arguments happen all the time. Recently by Donald Trump argued in criminal court he couldn’t be prosecuted for acts as President unless he was impeached and convicted by the Senate first….after arguing in his second impeachment trial that Senators should not convict, because he could be prosecuted as a private citizen later.
It’s definitely a stretch to suggest that a bill passed in Congress is proven to be a pre-meditated deception because a lawyer made an opposite argument to win a case in court. But this is an era of stretching reality to the breaking point.
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Second time could be the charm
The last time there was an attempt to reform social security was 2005, just after George W. Bush won a second term as president. Bush wanted to partially privatize Social Security so that payers into the system could use the power of the markets to get a good return on their money. Of course, this meant that they would also bear the risk of those very same volatile financial markets.
This move confounded people at the time because it came out of nowhere. Yes, there was some awareness that the program was on track to be in trouble and that some kind of reform was necessary. But it was not a popular issue with the electorate. So a bold move to revamp it wasn’t really seen as a well-calculated risk.
In addition, Bush’s victory was not a large one. He did win the popular vote, and surpassed 50% of the vote, but his winning margin was still only 2.4 points. And his Electoral College victory was extremely narrow even by today’s standards, 286-251. So it’s not like Bush could claim an obvious mandate to overhaul the most popular social program, which had existed for almost 70 years largely untouched.
Bush paid a price for this. He went around the country promoting this plan to garner support. But public opinion got worse and worse the more he talked about it. He eventually gave up and subsequently got swatted down in the 2006 midterms.
Back then, Bush was trying to be seen as a “compassionate conservative”, and appeared to be acting in good faith. He wasn’t so much against the existence of the program, but understood it needed to be adjusted to survive. And his argument was that people would gain more benefit from a privatization than its current state. He took a conservative-minded approach—privatization—to a problem with the entitlement, but wasn’t trying to undermine that entitlement.
Social Security in 2024
20 years later, as attitudes toward government have gotten more distrustful, an undermining campaign is at hand. In contrast to 2005, this time there will be an effort to shape deeply negative feelings towards the program.
Mike Lee’s Xeet, and Musk’s trumpeting of it is an initial attempt to take advantage of the conspiratorial leanings of large swaths of the public. They are going to try to convince people that Social Security is actually bad for them; that it takes away their freedom instead of enhancing it by giving them a financial safety net.
It will be challenging for them, however. When people are asked about their feelings on Social Security, while they acknowledge that the program needs fixing, they usually still believe in it, don’t want benefits reduced, and favor raising taxes on the wealthy to ensure its solvency.
It remains to be seen if this campaign will be successful. But it is going to be a test of the new media environment. Elon Musk bought Twitter to mold the electorate into his vision and push pro-MAGA propaganda into the information landscape. It may have created a political atmosphere that nudged Trump to victory in the 2024 election.
Will it do the same for the cutting of Social Security? With this initial effort by Lee and Musk to prime the nation for its demolishing, we are about to find out.
Jeremy Novak is the editor of Thinker at the Gates
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Here’s an idea: Currently, Social Security taxes are only imposed on the first ≈$160,000/year of income. Eliminate that cap. Take Social Security tax on all earned income. (Note that this still exempts unearned income.)
Social Security problems fixed. You’re welcome. 🤔😉😊
Social Security was created back when senior citizens were so destitute that they were eating cat food. Perhaps that’s better than being “dependent on the government??” Rich people always come up with some excuse to rip away the social safety net.