Joe Biden calls President Trump’s executive order deferring payroll tax payments through the end of the year a “reckless war on Social Security.” Nancy Pelosi says the President’s actions may lead to “shattering the sacred promise of Social Security.” Chuck Schumer warns that “President Trump’s plan to eliminate Social Security’s dedicated funding would endanger seniors’ Social Security and could mean the end of Social Security as we know it by 2023.”
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Question: Where were these people in 2010 when Barack Obama first cut payroll taxes, and in 2012 when he extended them for another year through his campaign for re-election?
The answer is that they were all in. In a 2012 interview with PBS, Mrs. Pelosi said the Obama payroll tax cut “is necessary because our economy and our people need this boost.” When asked if she worried about the impact on the Social Security Trust Fund, she said, “No, I don’t worry about that.”
Ditto for Mr. Biden. In a January 12, 2011, op-ed for USA Today headlined “Payroll tax cut creates jobs, won’t hurt Social Security,” the then Vice President accused those who said it threatened the solvency of Social Security of spreading “misinformation,” because any lost revenues would be made up for from general revenues. He also wrote that cutting payroll taxes “is one of the most effective ways to spark real, lasting economic growth.”
As for the senior Democratic Senator from New York, in a 2011 tweet he said Republican “stalling of payroll tax cut shows they are still putting politics before recovery.”
Democrats have also forgotten what their own economic experts said at the time. White House economist Austan Goolsbee said cutting payroll taxes was one of the keys “to the short-run recovery of the economy and getting the growth rate up.”
Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, said the payroll tax cut was a way to bring relief to working families and “perhaps even more importantly, it’s what we need for the economy.” Mr. Obama sold cutting payroll taxes as a way to “put money back into the pockets of working Americans.”
The real threat to Social Security’s solvency isn’t a small and temporary payroll tax cut. It’s the trillions in new spending proposed by Mr. Biden when retiree entitlements already threaten to bankrupt the federal fisc.
Mr. Biden would send Medicare closer to insolvency by lowering the eligibility age to 60 from 65 even as American lifespans increase. And he plans to eliminate the earnings cap and start applying Social Security taxes to all income above $400,000 a year, which would rewrite the original design of Social Security by making it explicitly an income-redistribution program.
A temporary payroll tax cut isn’t all that great for growth because it doesn’t change incentives to hire or work, but it does let people keep more of their own money. For that reason it’s popular, which is the real reason Democrats are demagoguing Social Security. The only reason they’re against a payroll tax cut now is because Mr. Trump is for it.
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About that ‘War’ on Social Security - The Wall Street Journal
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