Does the Democrat Party run on nothing but fear? I’m not convinced it can. Fear of everything except government, which, ironically, is the one thing we ought to fear. So, when Donald Trump became president again, like the first time, the left went about filling the culture and airwaves with fear.
Fear that Trump will cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Instead, he cut USAID, and identified tens of thousands of ineligible recipients of government services, effectively freeing up more money for those who earned it or needed it.
The average Social Security payment for retired workers reached $2,000 for the first time ever, according to a report released by the Social Security Administration (SSA) this week.
For retired workers, the average monthly payment stood at $2,002.39, up 4.5 percent from $1,916 a year earlier, according to the data.
Cost of living increases, most likely, but the optics are what make this amusing and worth some attention. Trump is supposed to compromise the system and gut benefits for our most vulnerable, but so far, no joy. It hasn’t happened. And the identification and termination of checks to dead people or those too old to be alive helps delay the inevitable insolvency of a system desperate for reform.
Social Security won’t be going away. It is so integrated into society that it is political suicide to suggest it.
Reform is, itself, nearly impossible. Changing the age at which you can collect is no less a hot potato.
The Dems had a plan to end it with ample help from Republicans. Spend us into insolvency, and everyone on the dole gets cut off when the fake money runs out. Give until we collapse. The Cloward-Pivening of America. Reduce it to fiscal ashes and economic ruin from which the utopian phoenix may rise.
Translation: centrally planned superstate seizes control of everything in the name of empathy and another Marxist shithole is spawned.
Mr. Trump isn’t exactly a belt-tightener. He has this idea that if we grow the economy back large enough, we can address all the debt, real, and promised. He’s not wrong. It’s the only way we’ll ever get there from here. But Republicans in Congress need to line up and support recision bills and shrink the federal footprint permanently so that future budgets will be smaller and opportunities for waste and fraud fewer.
It was never going to happen overnight, and (kicks the dead horse again) in one presidential term, but more has been accomplished in a few months to point us in the right direction than in decades.
Social Security remains in danger and is on track to become insolvent unless Congress takes more serious action to reduce the federal footprint. Prevent tax hikes, cut taxes, eliminate waste and fraud, encourage growth, and we can at least get our toes off the ledge.
Democrats don’t want that, so Mr. Trump has to be the villain when it is their polices that put these programs at risk.
