If Trump is not impeached and is reelected in November, senior citizens and their children have reason to worry. When Trump was running in 2016, he talked like a Democrat when it came to entitlement programs, promising to protect Social Security and Medicare. He also promised to lower prescription drug prices.
Since then he’s done nothing on drugs except keep making unkept promises. He has busily tried to whittle away at entitlements including Social Security Disability payments, Medicaid for low-income Americans, and has aggressively sought the repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage of nine million people.
While hanging out with his plutocratic “friends” in Davos, he let slip his plans after he is “exonerated” by the Senate. He’s going to take on entitlement spending because cutting it will be “the easiest of all things.”
If you’ve been paying attention you will recall such boasts are Trump’s stock in trade. He’s claimed that reaching a better nuclear deal with Iran would be easy. So would concluding a trade deal with China, as would winning a tariff fight. Replacing NAFTA would also be child’s play.
Are you tired of winning yet? More to the point, if you are over 65, are you tired of receiving a monthly Social Security check or having medical costs underwritten by Medicare? If not, you’d better vote as if your future health and solvency are on the ballot.
Millennials who chaff at paying the payroll tax, now that they have a job and aren’t living in their parents’ basement, had better not get too excited about Trump’s easy-peasy plan to cut entitlements if they don’t want Mom nd Dad moving into their basement and requiring help paying their hospital bills.
Trump has already proposed cuts of hundreds of billions in Social Security, Disability, Medicaid and Medicare. He claims he’s just after waste and fraud, but his idea of waste may be another man’s idea of survival.
There’s no question entitlement costs are a problem, and some of it stems from gaming of the system by providers. More government oversight, not less government spending is the cure for that ill. Still, the bigger problem is demographic reality. The baby boom bulge, which includes the extra-large bulge of Trump, has been coming for decades, yet the government has failed to make the needed adjustments in anticipation of the deluge.
Now that very large Boomer cohort is between 74 and 56 years of age. Many of them are on Social Security and Medicare (along with their elders), and they will be until the 2040s. Seventy-million Americans now rely on a monthly stipend from Social Security and almost 44 million are on Medicare — a number that will rise to 79 million by 2030. That’s a lot of voters to infuriate.
The cost for these services is now roughly $2 trillion a year — $950 billion for Social Security, $150 billion for Disability and $850 billion for Medicare. We can afford to take care of our senior citizens who all their working lives supported their elders with their payroll taxes. All other developed countries manage to do so. But the intergenerational compact only works if sufficient tax revenues are raised to fund the obligation, and costs are kept under control.
We are now running annual budget deficits of $1 trillion a year, not because of entitlement spending but because of Trump’s tax-cut giveaway to the top one percent of earners and corporations. He has crowed about the booming economy juiced by tax cuts and deficit spending, saying to the Davos billionaires “Who the hell cares about budgets?”
If you are a senior dependent on Social Security and Medicare or soon will be, or if you are the adult child or grandchild of recipients, you’d better care about budgets and about a president who does care about entitlements that are owed to senior citizens. Trump wants to repeal and replace Obamacare and other entitlements. Voters should repeal and replace him before he can vivisect their entitlements. Reneging on deals and cheating the other guy is his modus operandi. Cheating several generations at once is ambitious even for him.