Tag: social security

With Friends Like This: GOP Senator Joins Forces with Elizabeth Warren to Push the Largest Tax Hike in Over FOUR DECADES

The one thing conservatives could generally count on from Republicans was their consistent opposition to tax increases. But one GOP Senator has decided to toss that principle aside and join forces with one of America’s most notorious leftists.

On Tuesday, Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Senator Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren (D-MA) wrote an editorial published by the far-left New York Times, which outlined their plan to ‘save’ Social Security.

Moreno and Warren correctly note that Social Security is facing a major funding crisis. By late 2032, the fund from which most Social Security beneficiaries are paid will be severely depleted unless Congress takes action.

If Congress does nothing, Social Security benefits could be cut by more than 20 percent.

The Senators write that instead of reducing the benefits, the government should adopt what they call a common-sense solution: lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap.

Warren and Moreno say that this is one way to make the payroll tax and solve the Social Security funding crisis for “another generation.”

More From the New York Times:

For 2026, the payroll tax cap, or taxable maximum, is $184,500. Workers and their employers each pay 6.2 percent on wages up to that amount. (Self-employed individuals pay 12.4 percent.) Today, the maximum Social Security withholding for one worker is $22,878, or 12.4 percent of $184,500. Not a penny more, even if an individual’s salary far exceeds $184,500.

Since the vast majority of Americans make less than that, most people are paying Social Security taxes on 100 percent of their earnings, while the highest earners are paying on only part of theirs.

Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer? This is doubly unfair in an economy in which top earners’ wages, over time, have pulled far ahead of those of the average worker.

According to one estimate, eliminating the payroll tax cap would inject around $3 trillion into the program over the next 10 years. Lifting the cap so that all income is treated the same would generate substantial revenue that would extend the solvency of Social Security for another generation.

But what Warren and Moreno do not tell readers is that lifting the payroll tax cap would result in the largest tax increase in more than four decades.

This proposal would have a particularly devastating impact on sole proprietors, and costs would fall entirely on working Americans.

Moreover, the plan is more radical than any tax hike Joe Biden proposed.

Here is the National Review with the damning details:

That would represent a $3.4 trillion tax hike over a decade. As a share of gross domestic product, it would be the largest tax hike in over 40 years — eclipsing Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, according to the Tax Foundation.

Not only would it represent a stunning betrayal of his own voters, as Moreno signed the Americans for Tax Reform’s pledge against any tax increases — it would even violate the $400,000-a-year Joe Biden threshold for tax increases.

Such a massive tax increase would also have crushing economic effects. Employers who don’t want to absorb the increase in payroll taxes will have to hire fewer workers or keep wages lower. It would place a significant burden on small business owners who operate as sole proprietors and pay self-employment taxes. And at a time when affordability has become a major issue, these costs would fall entirely on working-age Americans.

What makes Moreno’s turn to the hard left more distressing is that he has been one of the Senate’s most reliable MAGA warriors, particularly on immigration.

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Trump Says Almost 300K Illegal Aliens Purged from Social Security Rolls

President Donald Trump announced that roughly 300,000 illegal aliens in the United States have been removed from Social Security rolls, and added that 100,000 have been removed from Medicare.

While speaking at The Villages in Florida, Trump highlighted policies geared towards seniors such as No Tax on Social Security. Trump also spoke about the One Big, Beautiful Bill and how it was “the largest tax cut in American history,” adding that “as a result, more than 51 million American seniors now pay a federal tax rate of zero.”

“Together with the Republicans in Congress, we’ve removed nearly 300,000 illegal aliens from the Social Security roll,” Trump said. “And, we’ve removed more than 100,000 migrants from Medicare eligibility, 100,000, and the number is going up.”

Trump continued to express that his administration and the Republicans were “saving Social Security, because it was so rife with fraud.”

“The Democrats didn’t care, they couldn’t care less,” Trump continued. “All they care about is Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome. They are sick. They are lunatics. We’re dealing with lunatics.”

In August 2025, Trump announced that more than 200,00 illegal aliens had been removed from the Social Security system.

Breitbart News has reported that the Trump administration has also cancelled thousands of Social Security numbers that previous administrations had given to illegal aliens.

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DOGE Attacks on Social Security Have Left Millions in the Lurch

When Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was running roughshod over the Social Security Administration (SSA) last year, experts warned it could spell disaster for disabled, ill, and aging Americans who depend on its programs. A March 2026 report by the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) and the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) offers insights into just how dire the situation has become.

“It seems that applications are taking longer and being denied more often and running into more errors in the process,” Matthew Borus, a professor at Binghamton University and one of the report’s authors, told Truthout.

The new report is based on interviews with more than 50 benefits specialists working at dozens of organizations nationwide that, together, assist about 8,000 claimants each year in obtaining and maintaining Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Those programs provide financial assistance to about 13.5 million older Americans and those with disabilities.

The programs have long been criticized for their inadequacy and steep barriers to access. Now, things are getting worse. “It just feels like you’re banging your head against the wall,” Brenna, who is using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation against her organization or clients, told Truthout.

Brenna works as an attorney at a medical-legal partnership in Washington, D.C., an organization comparable to those interviewed for the DREDF and AAPD report. She helps vulnerable patients apply for SSI/SSDI.

“It becomes difficult to trust even what advice you can give patients because you hardly know what to expect [yourself] because sometimes what the Social Security Administration says is, in fact, what happens, and often, it’s not,” Brenna told Truthout.

Contradictions and a lack of accountability were among the common issues identified in the DREDF and AAPD report. Others include challenges with a new phone system, inconsistent and confusing field office policies, longer processing times, more denials and errors, and an increased number of overpayments and payment center issues.

These problems are likely the result of a series of changes to SSA’s customer service processes that began soon after Donald Trump returned to the White House on a mission to gut the federal workforce and slash spending on social services.

The Social Security Administration lost about 7,500 employees, or 13 percent of its workforce, from January 2025 to January 2026, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. Customer service positions were hit especially hard, with a loss of over 3,000 staff tasked with assisting visitors to field offices and callers to the administration’s national 800 number, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report. That same report found that leadership shifted thousands of the remaining workers into customer service positions to plug gaps, but this means that many now responsible for customer support have little to no experience in their roles.

Changes have also come to the phone system. Brenna told Truthout she now often waits upwards of an hour on hold before reaching an agent, and once connected, the call often drops after only a couple of minutes. Borus said in his interviews with benefits specialists that many reported their calls were often rerouted between field offices, making it difficult to resolve case-specific issues.

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You Are Paying for Retirees’ Lavish Lifestyles

As he celebrated the 50th anniversary of Social Security, then–Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill (D–Mass.) hailed the program’s epic accomplishments.

In the days before Social Security was born, O’Neill said, “Life for the elderly is filled with uncertainty, dependency, and horror. When you get old, you are without income, without hope.” The federal government’s payments to retirees, he continued, meant that Americans no longer had to live in “fear and dependency” in old age.

It was a tidy summary of the conventional wisdom surrounding America’s old-age entitlement state—which includes not just Social Security, but also Medicare and many other taxpayer-funded efforts to subsidize the supposedly nasty, brutish, and not-so-short lives of the over-65 crowd.

It is a narrative that deserves to be shoved off a cliff.

Today’s retirees, most of them from the baby boomer generation, are the wealthiest cohort of Americans. The median household headed by someone over age 65 is far wealthier than the average household headed by someone in their late 30s.

Despite that, roughly 22 cents of every dollar the federal government spent last year was funneled to retirees via Social Security. Medicare spending accounted for another 14 percent. Many of those dollars were extracted from younger, poorer Americans. (The rest were borrowed and added to the national debt.)

A retired couple today might possess a robust retirement account and own a million-dollar home, but the government still acts as if they live in the poverty-stricken hellscape that O’Neill described. And as the old have gotten wealthier, the taxpayer-funded benefits have only gotten more lavish.

Social Security provides inflation-proof monthly payments, keeping retirees ahead of the curve even as working-age Americans struggle to make ends meet. In many places, seniors are gifted special exemptions from taxes on homes and vehicles that aren’t available to younger Americans. Medicare, created to address seniors’ medical needs, now offers such taxpayer-funded perks as discounted golf course fees, ski resort lift tickets, even pet supplies and pickleball equipment.

In short: Today’s old-age entitlement system is not a last-resort guardrail against poverty and desolation. It is a sprawling, expensive lifestyle-subsidy program that steals from the poor to give to the rich—while also worsening the housing crisis and pushing the country toward a dangerous fiscal cliff.

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28% of US Voter Verifications Have NO MATCH at Social Security Administration

Since 2004, the Social Security Administration has provided a simple process to help States with verifying voter applications. It’s called the HAVV System. States send in the name, DOB, and last four digits of the voter’s SSN. The SSA then notifies the State if that person is deceased, alive, matches SSA records, or No Match Found!

A whopping 13% of all HAVV verifications processed in 2025 came back as NO MATCH. That’s 318,217 of the 2.37 million submitted. Since 2011, an astounding 28.8% of all HAVV submissions have come back as NO MATCH. For the past 15 years, the federal government (SSA) has been unable to match 28.1 million voter submissions from States, to the information in its comprehensive computer systems. The Feds have every right to know what garbage is being processed at the State level for our Federal elections.

These alarming percentages most certainly are justification for the DOJ to have access to any State’s voter rolls, including the voter’s full SSN. Yet, activist Judges in MI, OR, and CA tossed out the DOJ cases for voter rolls. The HAVV program was created to process new voters who can’t provide a valid Driver’s License during registration.

This amount of “Non Matches” is why passing the SAVE Act, which requires voter ID, is simply imperative.

When a blue State receives a “NO MATCH” report from their own Federal Government, do you think they reject, or approve that voter application?

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The U.S. Is Stealing From Millennials and Gen Z To Make Boomers Even Richer

For years, pointing out the obvious was considered impolite: America’s biggest, most distortionary transfer of wealth does not flow from elites to the working class. Nor does it show up as corporate welfare. It flows from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy. It’s the defining injustice of our fiscal regime, the largest driver of our government debt, and the quiet engine behind the malaise of Millennials and Gen Z.

More than a decade ago, Reason editor at large Nick Gillespie and I wrote a piece arguing that Social Security and Medicare had together become the great cause of America’s generational inequity. We noted that senior households were wealthier than ever while young households still working to make ends meet had to prop them up further.

We also warned of the threat to a genuine social safety net. Treating every elderly person, no matter how well off, as a member of a protected class entitled to increasingly unaffordable benefits will eventually destroy a system that progressives in particular cherish.

Around that time, “Occupy Wall Street” protesters were railing against “the 1 percent.” I offered the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they also consider occupying the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the most powerful lobby defending the largest intergenerational wealth grab in American history.

As such, I greatly appreciated seeing Russ Greene, managing director of the Prime Mover Institute, join the fight and coin the term “Total Boomer Luxury Communism” in an important article over at the American Mind. The name sounds like a joke, but the math is sound.

American heads of households younger than 35 now have a median net worth of about $39,000 and an average net worth of more than $183,000. Those over 75 have a median net worth of roughly $335,000 and an average net worth exceeding $1.6 million. As a group, today’s seniors are the wealthiest we’ve ever had.

Many own their homes outright in markets younger families cannot afford to enter. Seniors enjoy higher rates of stock ownership and have benefited enormously from decades of rising asset values. Meanwhile, younger Americans face soaring housing costs, student loan debt, delayed family formation, and a labor market shaped by slower growth and higher federal indebtedness.

Some of this reflects natural wealth accumulation over time, and there is nothing wrong with that. But why does the modern welfare state magnify the disparity? As Green explains, “retired millionaires have become the greatest recipients of government aid,” as Social Security can redistribute up to $60,000 a year to an individual and $117,000 to a household. “Meanwhile,” Green notes, “Medicare programs are paying for golf balls, greens fees, social club memberships, horseback riding lessons, and pet food.”

Younger Americans are also on the hook for about $73 trillion in unfunded obligations projected over the next 75 years, making now the time to act. Some defenders of the status quo argue that higher taxes will fix the problem, but it would again fall on younger earners to continue redistributing benefits to the same affluent seniors, worsening the generational imbalance. The problem is not a lack of revenue; it’s a benefit structure that ignores modern demographics, modern wealth patterns, and basic fairness. Paying less to seniors who don’t need the money is the only fair reform to this dilemma.

Every time someone points these facts out, defenders respond reflexively: “But seniors paid in. They earned it.” No, not all of it. Not in any meaningful, actuarial sense.

We’ve known for decades that the system is wildly unbalanced. As Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute points out, a typical average-wage retiree in the 2030s will receive 37 percent more in Social Security benefits than they paid in taxes. Medicare is even more lopsided: Seniors routinely receive three to five times the amount they contributed.

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SSA Made $114 Million in Improper Payments to Spouses and Children of Beneficiaries, Audit Finds

The Social Security Administration (SSA) made about $114 million in improper payments to children and spouses of beneficiaries, the agency’s watchdog, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), said in a Sept. 18 audit report.

The Social Security Act limits the amount of benefits paid to children and spouses of retired, disabled, and deceased individuals. The maximum amount that can be paid to children or spouses of a beneficiary combined is referred to as the “family maximum,” the report stated.

If the total monthly benefits paid exceed the family maximum limit, SSA is obliged to reduce such payments to bring them in line with the threshold, according to the report.

In the audit, the OIG analyzed 23,603 Social Security records of benefit payments, estimating that the SSA correctly adjusted benefits for 15,211 of these records in accordance with the family maximum provisions.

However, “SSA improperly paid approximately $114 million to spouses and children on 8,392 wage earners’ records (36 percent),” the report stated.

This includes both underpayments and overpayments. For instance, the OIG checked 225 samples from the 23,603 records and identified SSA to have made $1 million in underpayments and $189,940 in overpayments.

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Illegals Exploit Social Security Loophole to Steal 2020 Election Votes

In 2022, Jovan Hutton Pulitzer revealed at a Scottsdale, Arizona event that 10,000 illegal immigrants used one Social Security number to vote in the 2020 presidential election.

Furthermore, Elon Musk’s February 2025 X post confirmed the Social Security database allows duplicate numbers, enabling massive fraud.

Moreover, recent findings by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) substantiate these claims, exposing a $1.7 trillion tax fraud scheme. Consequently, these facts demand urgent reforms to protect American citizens’ votes in our Constitutional Republic.

Initially, at a 2022 Scottsdale, Arizona event, Jovan Hutton Pulitzer exposed that 10,000 illegal immigrants used a single Social Security number to vote in Arizona’s 2020 election.

Specifically, he detailed how factories assigned identical numbers to workers, unchecked by the IRS, allowing voter registration through Motor Voter laws.

“The IRS unconnected our names from the Social Security number. Now when you look it up, it just pings to see if there’s an employer. If there is, it says it’s good. It validates it. Why do they do that? Because all of these factories are giving them Social Security numbers. The government turns its back on it. As soon as you have a Social Security number and you go over to Motor Voter, pass the driver’s test, you get a driver’s license. If you’re a Social Security, you must be a citizen.” [Source: Video from 2022 Scottsdale, Arizona event]

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DOGE: Social Security Officially Removes 12.3 Million Individuals Listed Age 120+

Social Security has removed from its rolls 12.3 million individuals listed as 120 years old or older, according to the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The discrepancies in the Social Security figures and the alarming ages of some of the individuals listed have garnered national attention over the last several months.

As a result, in March DOGE began to update the American people on the massive cleanup begun by Social Security. In a March 18 update, DOGE said Social Security had marked 3.2 million social security number holders aged 120 or older as deceased, warning that there was still more work to be done.

Over one month later, on April 24, DOGE provided another update, revealing that a stunning 11 million individuals listed as age 120+ were now marked as deceased.

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Social Security Clean Up Continues, 12.3 Million Finally Marked as Deceased

After 11 weeks, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has hit a milestone in its major cleanup initiative to remove more than 12.3 million names of Social Security number holders whose dates of birth make them over 120 years old.

DOGE team members continue to deal with what they call “complex cases” that remain, including investigating instances where an individual has two or more different birth dates on file.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) touted the efforts of DOGE to root out fraud, calling the cleanup of Social Security rolls “remarkable.”
Earlier this year, DOGE chief Elon Musk warned of millions of Social Security recipients well over the age of 100 who were still collecting benefits.

The number of potentially fraudulent Social Security number holders included some 7.2 million individuals who would be between 120 and 139 years old, another 4.8 million who would be between 140 and 159 years of age and a group of 124,000 individuals who would be more than 160 years old.

In March, the Social Security Administration (SSA) issued a statement saying:

“The data reported in the media represent people who do not have a date of death associated with their record. While these people may not be receiving benefits, it is important for the agency to maintain accurate and complete records.”

The SSA database, which tracks the numbers issued, has existed since 1936 and was flagged during a review in March of 2015 that discovered that the death records had not been updated for 6.5 million individuals over the age of 112, all of who were presumed to be deceased.

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