I just finished reading this article, which demonstrates that Trump’s desire to get rid of the payroll tax and fund social security from general revenues is not feasible.
The article demonstrates once again that those of us on the left often, almost always, fail to appreciate that Republicans take the long view of things.
This blog actually started in reaction to W’s attempt to destroy social security, by converting it to a private account system. That didn’t fly.
Getting rid of the payroll tax and using general revenues to pay social security would accomplish more than just making the program financially unstable, and this is something that goes unremarked by most commentators.
Franklin Roosevelt recognized, when he started the program, that funding it by a special tax gave recipients the ability, indeed the right, to claim that they were owed their benefits, that the money in the trust fund was, in fact, their money. If the program were paid out of general revenue it would become a welfare program, and it would immediately be attacked as such by the Republicans, whose Holy Grail has been the destruction of the program since the day it was enacted. W actually thought he could do it, but he was deluded. Only Joe Lieberman, of all the “Democrats”, was willing to consider it. Trump thinks he can do it too. If he’s reelected, he will probably become a dictator, so maybe he will, but I’m inclined to think that he won’t be able to pull off a coup. In any event, that’s the point of getting rid of the payroll tax: to convert the program into a “welfare” program that can be attacked on that basis. Always keep in mind that policy is not Trump’s thing; someone is whispering in his ear about this, and he’s decided he likes the idea. He may be unaware of the long term strategy behind such a conversion, but the propaganda value of converting it to a “welfare” system is a big part of it.