Say No to the RSC Plan to Gut Social Security and Medicare

A panel of three-quarters of the House Republican caucus released a budget proposal on Wednesday that would raise the Social Security retirement age—cutting benefits across the board—while further privatizing Medicare and slashing taxes for the rich. Far from raising taxes on the rich, the RSC budget calls for massive tax cuts by proposing a permanent extension of the individual tax provisions of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that such a move would add $2.5 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. Only a few weeks ago, Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans threatened to default on the national debt because President Biden’s budget didn’t cut the deficit enough. Nancy Altman, the president of Social Security Works, said the RSC budget would “destroy Social Security as we know it,” using a “modest shortfall” that’s more than a decade away to justify reducing benefits for millions. “These changes would transform Social Security from an earned insurance benefit, which replaces wages lost in the event of old age, disability, or death, into a subsistence-level welfare benefit,” said Altman, who noted that the RSC “rules out any options for raising revenue, such as requiring billionaires to contribute even a penny more.” Currently, just the first $160,200 of wage earnings are subject to Social Security’s payroll tax, allowing the rich to stop contributing to the program early each year. The GOP’s refusal to force the wealthy to put more of their income into the program “leaves benefit cuts as the only ‘solution,’” said Altman. “In other words, they want to cut benefits now to avoid cutting them later, which isn’t a solution at all. Indeed, the budget will increase the number of workers who will have no ability to retire while maintaining their standard of living,” she added. “The RSC plan would make it especially hard for Americans so disabled that they can no longer work to claim their earned Social Security, and far easier for the government to take those benefits away.” Don’t allow this proposal, which hurts the poor and middle class who depend on Social Security and Medicare, to preserve tax cuts which gave a roughly $49,000 annual tax cut to the top 1% and eliminated the estate tax—a tax that impacts inheritance of assets over $13 million.