Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Austerity Policy and Social Security

 Republicans in the House of Representatives are preparing a vote on the Orwellian-ly named Fair Tax Act, which would eliminate Social Security and Medicare’s dedicated funding, abolish the IRS, and levy a 30% sales tax on everything. 

This proposal is bad bad bad bad bad. Let me count the ways:

  • Replacing federal income, corporate, and property taxes shifts the tax burden away from the wealthy to people who actually have to spend all of their money―especially seniors. With rising prices all over, the last thing seniors need is to pay an extra 30% on everything they buy.

  • Abolishing Social Security and Medicare’s dedicated funding would bring us one step closer to Wall Street’s goal of destroying Social Security and Medicare. As FDR said of the dedicated funding: “We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

  • The proposal calls on the Social Security Administration to figure out how much income it would have collected from payroll contributions, but provides the Social Security Administration no additional funding to effectively replace the IRS as a clearing-house of employment and wage data.

This bill is an attack on our Social Security system and a huge handout to millionaires and billionaires. It’s just the latest stage of the Republican war on seniors.

Sign now: Tell Congress to REJECT the so-called Fair Tax Act and protect Social Security!

No comments:

Post a Comment