Social Security: What Would a Nikki Haley Presidency Mean for Benefits?
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Vance Cariaga
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Although former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is a long shot to win the Republican nomination for president, she continues to stay in the race against ex-president and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. This means Social Security advocates and beneficiaries are taking a good hard look at Haley’s positions on the retirement benefits program.
So far, Haley has floated some general ideas about Social Security reform without offering much detail about how to implement the ideas or what their impact might be. As GOBankingRates previously reported, Haley has proposed cutting Social Security benefits for the wealthy and raising the full retirement age for younger Americans currently in their 20s or 30s.
Those types of ideas were enough for Haley to win endorsements from mainstream limited-government advocates, CNN reported in December. Her calls to cut or eliminate benefits for the wealthy are especially attractive to some members of the Republican establishment.
“We need a complete reevaluation of entitlements,” Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, told CNN. “What the hell is a guy like me (doing) getting $3,500 a month from the government? That’s outrageous. I shouldn’t get a nickel.”
Most everyone agrees that something should be done to fix Social Security before the program’s Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund runs out of money. That’s expected to happen in about a decade. When it does, Social Security will have to rely solely on payroll taxes for funding, and they cover only about 77% of current benefits.
Haley advocates several changes to Social Security that would trim the program.
“We’ll keep these programs the same for anyone who’s in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or older, period,” she said last year. “And we’ll preserve Social Security and Medicare for the next generation. I’ll limit benefits for wealthy people.”
As Business Insider reported in January, Haley told a town hall gathering hosted by Fox News that Medicare and Social Security will be bankrupt soon if changes aren’t made.
“The way we deal with it is we don’t touch anyone’s retirement or anyone who’s been promised in, but we go to people like my kids in their 20s when they’re coming into the system, and we say the rules have changed,” Haley said at the time.
Haley did not offer any further details other than to say that “65 is way too low” to receive full retirement benefits — even though 65 hasn’t been the full retirement age in a long time. Currently, the FRA is either 66 or 67, depending on your birth date. For anyone born in 1960 or later, the full retirement age is 67.
In any case, it is instructive that Haley has mainly emphasized raising the full retirement age for younger Americans and reducing benefits for the elderly. That means if she somehow makes it to the White House, you can probably expect her proposals to veer in those directions.
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