You pay into Social Security and Medicare every W-2 paycheck you earn your entire working life. You’re not getting anything for free. You paid for it. The Government is investing and growing your money. You earned those benefits. Yes, it is necessary to belabor this concept because GOP Senators like Mitt Romney Lindsey Graham, Rick Scott and Ron Johnson want to brand these programs as though someone is getting something for free. Nothing could be further from the truth.
My mother worked as a seamstress in the fur business for almost 50 years. My Dad got her into the profession; she never liked it. But as the sole support of a sick husband and two girls, my mom did what she had to do to take care of her family. She paid into Social Security and Medicare with every paycheck. As a union member, my mother also earned a pension. Unfortunately, the crooks who ran that pension made off with most of it. When she finally retired at 74, her pension was a tiny fraction of what it should have been. If not for the Social Security benefits that she’d been paying into since her twenties, she’d have been on the street.
I feel unfathomable rage that cynical, uber-rich GOP Senators have branded an earned benefit as an “entitlement” in order to bamboozle voters into somehow thinking it’s not your money. That these men don’t hang their heads in shame is astounding. They backed a plan to add trillions to the deficit to fund tax cuts for the rich. But for hard working citizens (many of whom vote for them, by the way), their only solution is for them to wind up destitute.
Don’t let anyone lie to you and pretend Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable. We are on solid ground through at least 2035 and there are solutions to be found for the long term. Raising the payroll tax cap on the wealthy would be a start. There are solutions to complex problems, but only if serious people apply themselves. Senators with more wealth than they can spend in 10 lifetimes seek only to help their rich benefactors, not you or me.
Please vote accordingly.
**Many thanks to Lisa S. for giving me permission to share her wonderful tweet messages below:
