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I can’t afford this Trump economy

Red said:
truthsocial.com

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

RECIPROCAL TARIFFS TAKE EFFECT AT MIDNIGHT TONIGHT! BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, LARGELY FROM COUNTRIES THAT HAVE TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF THE UNITED STATES FOR MANY YEARS, LAUGHING ALL THE WAY, WILL START FLOWING INTO THE USA. THE ONLY THING THAT CAN STOP AMERICA’S GREATNESS WOULD BE A RADICAL LEFT COURT...
truthsocial.com truthsocial.com
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Straight up fascist propaganda, no other way to see it. Blatantly false. But hordes of the cult will believe it.
 
Red said:
Yeah, thought about it for awhile, but finally chose “civil war” as my first choice in your “how will it play out” thread. He’s not going anywhere if he’s still alive come Nov., 2028.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo9par4ie6A
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Not only a ballroom but also a golf course and paved over the rose garden and made the oval office into a gaudy tacky gold shrine to himself.
He seems like he is trying to make the Whitehouse his permanent home.
 
Republicans have been having wet dreams over privatization of SS for as long as there’s been SS. Can’t possibly be a surprise that Republicans want to hurt workers….

www.marketwatch.com

All the reasons privatizing Social Security would be a terrible idea

Converting Social Security into millions of individual investment accounts would end the program as we know it.
www.marketwatch.com www.marketwatch.com

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent set off a firestorm this week when he said that the Trump administration had just taken the first steps toward a “back door for privatizing Social Security.”

Bessent, speaking to reporters at MAGA news site Breitbart, said this was a feature of the $1,000 investment accounts created for newborns by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump recently signed into law.

“At the end of the day, I am not sure when the distribution level date should be, whether it should be 30 and you can buy a house? Should it be 60? But in a way, it is a back door for privatizing Social Security,” Bessent said. “If, all of a sudden, these accounts grow and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, that’s a game-changer, too.”

Whatever Bessent and the administration really think, let’s make one thing absolutely clear. Converting Social Security into millions of individual investment accounts, as some on the right have proposed, would not merely constitute “privatizing” Social Security. It would involve breaking up or ending Social Security as we know it — abolishing the program and putting something new in its place.

Truly “privatizing” Social Security would mean handing over administration of the program and its trust fund to a private company, such as Fidelity or Vanguard, or possibly taking it public on the stock market. There is nothing particularly wrong with this idea in theory, but it would make zero sense in practice. Social Security is already run on a shoestring, while its investment policy — bonds, bonds and only bonds — has been set by Congress. How a private company could add value while extracting a profit for its own stockholders is hard to imagine.

But this is not what has been proposed. Instead, proponents of “privatizing” Social Security are talking about winding down the Social Security trust fund itself, in whole or in part, and replacing it with tens of millions of individual investment accounts. Some or all of the 12.4% flat Social Security payroll taxes would go into these accounts instead of the Social Security trust fund.

This is what Scott Bessent was alluding to when he told Breitbart that the new individual investment accounts were a back door to privatization. And, most famously, this is what President George W. Bush actually proposed 20 years ago — a proposal that sank like a lead balloon.

Whatever you think of this idea, it would be the beginning of the end of Social Security as we know it.

The current program is what’s known as a defined-benefit program, or pension. You are not responsible for the investment returns. What you get out each month in retirement simply depends on what you put in while you were working.
But Social Security is also an insurance program.

It insures us against poverty in old age. That’s why each of us gets credit for 90% of the wages we earn up to a low level, currently $1,226 a month, but much lower percentages for the wages we earn above that. The top priority of the program is that everybody who qualifies gets at least something to live on in retirement.
It insures us against longevity. Social Security pays you until you die, whether that happens when you are young or very, very old.

And it insures us against inflation. The annual cost-of-living adjustment, although it comes a year in arrears, raises benefits in line with consumer prices.
Gradually converting some or all of this program into about 250 million individual accounts would change all of that. (There are currently about 180 million workers paying into the system and 70 million beneficiaries drawing from it.)

The new accounts would have no defined-benefit feature. What you got out at the end would depend not only on your contributions but also on your investment returns. Crucially, the accounts would also have no insurance feature. Higher earners would not cross-subsidize low earners. Those who died young would not cross-subsidize those who lived to 110. Nobody would protect your retirement income from inflation.
This is one of those ideas that sounds better the less you think about it. Once you get into the details, as people did when Bush proposed the idea, it gets less appealing.
 
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