“I’ve never said I wanted to raise” the age of Social Security eligibility Nikki Haley said on Fox News. Later in the same interview, she said, “we're going to raise the retirement age to reflect life expectancy.”
In her Fox News Sunday interview today, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley accused Donald Trump of lying when he said she wants to cut Social Security and Medicare and to raise the retirement age from 65 to 74.
“He's not telling the truth there, and it cracks me up because he's actually reported as saying he wanted to raise it to 70,” she said.
FACT CHECK: True. Trump said that.
But Haley went on to pull the GOP sleight-of-hand of arguing for major cuts to Social Security and Medicare under the guise of claiming to want to protect it. Haley has already made it very clear she wants to gut or privatize Social Security. She did so again here – including saying she would raise the age of eligibility.
HALEY: I’ve never said I wanted to raise anybody's - what I've said is Social Security's going to go bankrupt in 10 years, Medicare's going to go bankrupt in eight. Every one of the candidates is saying they're not going to touch it. If you say you're not going to touch it, that means you're going to leave office and everybody's going to have at least a 23% benefits cut.
The accountant in me is saying don't wait for that to happen, get in front of it. So, what we should do is, America should keep her promises, people should not live in fear. We will go to those, like my kids in their twenties, and say we're going to raise the retirement age to reflect life expectancy for you.
Next came her push for privatization:
HALEY: Instead of cost of living increases, let's do increases based on inflation so it's more accurate, limit benefits on the mega-wealthy, they don't want the checks anyway, and let's expand Medicare Advantage plans. Seniors love the competition and it's good for them. When we do that, we'll see what we're dealing with. You don't have to take from people, but you don't deny like the rest of the opponents are doing. That's a mistake.
Anchor Shannon Bream asked, "But a later retirement age, potentially, is part of that?"
"For those in their twenties," Haley said.
The non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found that raising the retirement age would cut benefits for all new retirees and disproportionately harm seniors with low incomes.
More importantly, President Joe Biden has already proposed solutions for saving Social Security and Medicare: raising taxes on high earners. But Republicans and their Fox News friends never want to consider that easy fix because as much as they pretend otherwise, Republicans really want to be rid of the programs.
You can watch Haley make it clear she's out to cut Social Security and Medicare below, from the January 14, 2024 Fox News Sunday.
The GOP never wanted either Social Security or Medicare to exist. They have always been hostile to these programs and have done everything they could to disparage them and sabotage them. GOP politicians and Angry Right Wing pundits have spent decades referring to Social Security as a “Ponzi Scheme” or as “Social Insecurity” and trying to convince voters that the program doesn’t work and is going bankrupt. They’ve been unsuccessful in turning the public against these programs because the programs actually work, and seniors tend to be pleasantly surprised that they actually do receive the retirement insurance they’ve been paying for throughout their careers, despite GOP doomsaying that they would never see it.
The latest GOP approach, cultivated over the past 25 years, has been to refuse to make any common sense adjustments to the funding of the programs, thus setting up a situation where Angry Right Wingers could make the nonsensical comments Haley does here – about how the programs are about to go bankrupt and we better do something drastic to head that off. In reality, the GOP could head off any problems right now by agreeing to multiple simple steps that they’ve been stonewalling for over two decades.
The Dems’ solutions here, which the GOP has refused to consider, include raising the cap on applicable earnings from the 160K area to somewhere above 500K or removing it entirely, increasing the pool of applicable employees to include state and local governmental workers, and making a tiny incremental increase in the employer side of FICA. That last part could have been at 0.1% if the GOP and the Right Wing would have gotten out of the way in the early 2000s. Since they’ve obstructed it for this long, that number is now likely closer to 0.3% – not a large number, but higher than it could have been had the GOP not been sabotaging our ability to address the issue.
The one area where the GOP partly agrees with the Dems is in the notion of raising the retirement age. Except that the Dems want to make a very small, incremental increase from 67 to 69 over 20+ years, and the GOP wants an immediate jump from 67 to 70 to go into effect for everyone not currently retired. As the CBPP report notes, any increase in retirement age would really hit the lower income workers the hardest, as their age expectancy has never increased in the way the GOP currently tells people it has. (The GOP is of course planning a little switch-up if they get their way with the sudden increase – they’ll tell the angry near-retirees and everyone else that the program is failing just like the GOP had predicted, which would be part of their setting the stage to completely erase the program a few years later.
But Haley masks the larger part of the GOP approach to gutting SS, and she’s doing so with full knowledge of what that approach will do. Per the most updated Republican Study Committee plan, which is built from the 2010 Heritage Foundation Plan to “save” Social Security, the GOP idea is to change the basics of how the program works. The new idea would be to have SS be a flat monthly payment of $1200 per month for anyone who receives it. Right Wingers like to say this would mean an increase for some and a decrease for others, so that’s a good idea, right? Wrong. The actual impact is that low income retirees would see a small increase in their monthly payments and everyone else would get a larger and larger cut. For example, Middle Class retirees who were scheduled to receive 3K to 4K per month would now be told to live with $1200 instead.
But wait, it gets even better. Haley and her associates would then means-test the Social Security payments so that anyone with a decent pension or 401K would be told they are ineligible for most, if not all, of the $1200 each month. It doesn’t matter to the GOP that these Americans paid into FICA every week for decades. The GOP plan would be to tell that group to jump in the lake – as yet another way of proving their idea that “government can’t get anything done”. And it gets better still – the RSC has noted they want their new conditions to apply to everyone born after 1968. In other words, this would apply to people in their mid-50s right now, who are looking at retirement in about a decade. I note that even the Heritage Plan wasn’t this nasty – they were talking about their draconian cuts only applying to people born after 1985, who would have been 25 at the time they were promulgating those cuts. The current GOP has no such restraints on how poorly they want to treat the Middle Class. This probably should not be a surprise, given that the GOP enthusiastically skyrocketed the federal taxes of Middle Class Employees with the 2017 GOP Tax Transfer that the Dems still haven’t repealed.
Voters really need to keep this in mind when they go to the ballot booth in November. If the GOP gets their way and winds up with Nikki Haley in the White House and a GOP Congress, we can be certain they will move quickly to make the cuts described above, if not even more drastic ones.
