Istock Man holding back hands of time in front of a Social Security card

With his vile anecdote of a “Welfare Queen” implying a Black woman living on welfare and driving a Cadillac, Ronald Reagan merrily drove himself into the White House forty-four years ago. Half of eligible voters did not vote in 1980.

Reagan got 50.8% of the half that did vote. The media then decided that Reagan had a “mandate” which, of course, turned out to be about 25% of the eligible vote if you bother to do the math. Carter won a little more than 41%.

The media loved the charmingly sunny Reagan while Carter suffered from his “malaise” comment about inflation and the 52 American hostages held in Iran despite all his efforts to bring them home.

That race turned out to be the masculine version of a beauty pageant. Carter the victim of a rabbit bite vs. Reagan wearing his weathered cowboy hat and sunny grin and astride his trusty horse. Reagan cool, Carter not cool.

Reagan ushered in the return to the materialism that roared post World War II, to such a degree that one of the most popular American TV shows was “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” between 1984 and 1995.

The Democrats found themselves backpedaling to a smaller party that grew more demoralized as more Democrats switched parties. Those days, the zeitgeist was how much more fun to be a Republican, so let ‘er rip.

All those Great Society and New Deal Democratic Party “Safety Net” programs and uplifting the less privileged? That was so yesterday. By August 2, 1996, Bill Clinton was a “Third Way” Democrat and declared “the end of welfare as we know it.”

In short, the “Rich and Famous” started a 44-year run of soaking the middle class and the working poor. And they’re not yet sated. What’s left? SNAP for women with children and Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

So let’s focus on Social Security, both for retirees and the disabled.

The GOP’s stated cause for messing with Social Security yet again is the gigantic national debt, now at about $34 trillion. They don’t admit that Republican presidents, senators, and House members, with some help from Democrats, ran up the majority of that debt. But the Social Security Trust Funds are sequestered from the national debt.

Reagan signed a bipartisan bill to tax Social Security benefits in 1983. As his part of the bargain, he sequestered the funds to increase their lifespan. But in return, today’s seniors who work and draw Social Security face up to 50% taxation of their benefits if their employed taxable income exceeds $25,000 and 85% if their taxable income exceeds $35,000. Those tax receipts are returned to the Trust Funds. But, of course, that tax decreases the working beneficiaries’ annual income.

Imagine the GOP’s Lamborghini owner sitting still for that.

To satisfy that GOP Lamborghini owner, every Republican administration from Reagan to the present has given them tax reductions in the $ trillions.  

Not yet sated, those with the wealth and power now want to “reform” Social Security. Again. So, the House Republican majority has been dickering over how to satisfy their donors.

Republicans have tried for 90 years to do away with Social Security using every trick in the book.

Today’s GOP House members prefer a seven-person commission to study how to “protect” Social Security. Then, they want to send the commission’s recommendations to an up-or-down vote during the “lame duck session” after the election but before the new Congress is seated on January 3, 2025.

They’ve tried to privatize Social Security entirely or splinter it into two groups: people over 50 and those under 50. This divide-and-conquer ploy would result in a loss for both cohorts while the wished-for private sector administrators would profit.

Wall Street honchos were wary of declaring any interest in running the Funds as bad optics. Not surprising after the 2008 mortgage meltdown. Perhaps they weren’t interested. Or maybe they were just shy.

However, J.P. Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon recently suggested to then candidate Nikki Haley that his bank would be an excellent administrator for the Trust Funds.

Both The Motley Fool and The American Enterprise Institute recognize that 92% to 95% of investment advisors have failed to equal or beat the yearly S&P 500 since 1993.

One device to extend the life of the Trust Funds that has worked is the income cap, which was increased to $168,600 this year. But that is insufficient. Hypothetically, assume a taxpayer takes home $3 million per year. Subtracting this year’s tax cap nets them $2,831,400 assuming no other adjustments of any kind. Then assume a hypothetical Bible-based 10% tax rate on that $3 million with no other adjustments. That taxpayer nets $2,700,000, having paid in $300,000. Just a thought.

Government administration costs about 1%. The House’s current plan is to invest in bonds, but the fund already invests in non-marketable “special bonds,” paying the market rate. Other current plans are to cut benefits by 23% or 15%, add 2% to the payroll tax, or increase the age of eligibility which hides the fact that those beneficiaries would still receive less.

Who gets hurt? Those who now depend on Social Security and those who will rely on it in the future. Who gains? Well, let’s just say there’s another tax cut for the 1% and corporations coming.

And that is precisely the problem. The national debt, mostly run up by the GOP, with help from some Democrats, dramatically correlates with four decades of tax cuts for the 1% and corporations.

Investopedia notes that the national debt hovered in the $200 billion-$298 billion range after World War II until 1963, when our venture into Vietnam escalated into the war. Prior to that, the progressive tax system at the time and the booming post-war economy stabilized the debt to that range while paying off principal and interest.

Then Reagan’s tax cuts and heavy defense spending built up a $1.6 trillion debt. His was the first $ trillion deficit in U.S. history. Thank the Laffer Curve.

Reagan gutted the unions that created middle class wealth. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that executive compensation has risen by 1,322% from 1978 to 2020. Middle class wages have stagnated.

Reagan reduced regulation and scrapped anti-trust laws that correspond to Robert Bork’s recommended “consolidation,” now well on the way to monopolizing all U.S. industries. Mr. Bork sacrificed the middle class for “efficiency.” Massive reduction in jobs and competition resulted. Whole communities lost jobs and industry.

Then came leveraged buyouts that enriched corporate raiders. These raiders used debt financing to buy the corporation but encumbered it with enormous debt. So they sold the valuable corporate pieces to pay the debt, sent the dead husk and workers’ retirement benefits into bankruptcy, and walked away with their original investment plus their profit. Using those funds, they created their own hedge funds and private equity funds.

George H. W. Bush negotiated the globalization treaties. Bill Clinton removed some of the sting by helping to create service sector jobs and keeping environmental regulations. Then, he signed the globalization agreements that sent manufacturing jobs overseas.

Statistica calculates that the middle class has withered from 61% in 1971 to 50% as of 2021. As a percentage of US employment income, the middle class earned income has gone down from 62% to 42%.

George W. Bush added over $4 trillion in principal to the debt. Then, he conducted two wars and presided while the investment houses engaged in nearly universal banking fraud, which resulted in the 2008 mortgage meltdown. Bush never raised taxes to cover these extraordinary expenses.

Under Obama, no banker went to jail. When they realized that Obama would not assess accountability, the remaining bankers richly rewarded themselves.

Obama inherited Bush’s two wars and the broken banking system. Obama’s total debt was $7.7 trillion. His only contribution to the debt amounted to his health care and infrastructure programs which added $1.6 trillion to the clean-up after Bush.

The mortgage aftermath left us with 6 enormous banks, a colossus so unregulated as to own the nation, from healthcare companies to the housing markets for both purchase and rental.

PolitiFact found that Bush’s total debt was over $6.1 trillion. With the added interest, CAP20 estimates that Bush’s total will add up to $8 trillion in the end.

Then came Trump. Forbes called his tax cuts wasteful because they did not grow the economy. The vast majority of those cuts went to the soaring stock market. In four years, Trump’s contribution to the national debt was $8 trillion, and interest payments will add much more.

Then came COVID during Trump’s time in office. The stock market crashed and a significant amount of those Trump tax cuts disappeared into the ether. U.S. Bank states that the S&P 500 lost 19.4%, the Dow Jones Industrials lost 8.9%, and tech stocks lost between 22% and 66%.

Time Magazine has calculated that the last 4 decades have resulted in the transfer of $50 trillion of wealth upward from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

While the GOP's proposed changes would inflict yet more pain on the lower classes, the only plan that at least nods towards fairness is to increase the tax cap. President Biden proposes to raise taxes on people whose annual income is above $400,000 per r. That’s a start. But the evidence is overwhelming that it’s their turn to pony up.