Social Security: Trump Says He Will ‘Never Do Anything’ To Cut Benefits — What Is His Plan To Preserve the Program?
Written by
Vance Cariaga
Edited by
Daria Uhlig
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Former President Donald Trump has consistently repeated his intentions for Social Security retirement benefits should he win re-election to the White House this November. Last year, he said that “under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.” He backed that claim earlier this year, saying, “You don’t have to touch Social Security.”
Now Trump finds himself having to repeat the message after rival President Joe Biden accused Trump of proposing to cut entitlement programs — including, presumably, Social Security.
Biden’s accusation followed a March 11 CNBC interview where Trump said, “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.”
Trump didn’t specifically mention Social Security as being on the chopping block, but that didn’t stop the Biden campaign from seizing on the comments. As ABC News reported, Biden claimed Trump is “still at it” with threats to entitlement programs.
Trump pushed back at that claim in a later interview with Breitbart News.
“I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare,” Trump said. “We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.”
What’s unclear for now is how Trump intends to deal with a looming funding shortfall involving Social Security’s Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, which is expected to run out of money in about a decade. When that happens, Social Security will be solely reliant on payroll taxes for funding, which currently covers about 77% of benefits.
Biden proposed a four-point plan to bolster Social Security that would raise the income threshold on wages subject to Social Security payroll taxes and change the formula for annual cost-of-living adjustments. Trump has offered very few specifics on how he might deal with the OASI insolvency.
As president, Trump left Social Security benefits and eligibility requirements alone — just like every other president over the past four decades. But as GOBankingRates previously reported, a recent column in Arizona’s Northeast Valley News claimed that as president, Trump’s budget proposals “included cuts to Medicare and Social Security.”
That column cited a 2019 Vox article that analyzed Trump’s 2020 budget. At the time, Vox wrote that over the next decade, Trump’s budget proposal aimed to spend $1.5 trillion less on Medicaid, $25 billion less on Social Security and $845 billion less on Medicare, to cut Medicaid and Social Security benefits.
Whether either of those proposals will ever see the light of day is still unclear and likely hinges on the election results come November.
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