To: President Donald Trump
President Obama: Social Security Out of Your Budget
Do not propose Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts in your budget. It’s wrong and it’s not what we voted for. We will fight to kill any bill in Congress that includes cuts to these benefits.
Why is this important?
Our Social Security system has never contributed a penny to the deficit. Yet the President is planning to include cuts to Social Security in the budget he releases this year.
The debt we have comes from a decade of tax cuts for the wealthy, unlimited spending on foreign wars and a recession caused by unregulated Wall Street speculation. It’s wrong to ask senior citizens, veterans and the disabled to pay for the greed of the top 1%.
The President is proposing to use a cut called the “Chained CPI” that will cut benefits for every single Social Security beneficiary—now and in the future. The average earner would lose $4,631 in Social Security benefits by age 75, $13,910 by age 85; and $28,004 by age 95.
These cuts are an even bigger threat to the disabled and veterans, who would face the COLA cut for 30, 40 years or more. For example, a severely disabled, unmarried veteran who claims Veterans Disability Compensation benefits today at age 30 would experience a cumulative cut of $60,121 by age 65 and $144,189 by age 85!*
The average Social Security benefit is only $13,833. Over 12 million beneficiaries live on 125% of the poverty level ($13,485) or less. We have earned our retirement and disability benefits by contributing a portion of every paycheck to Social Security. And veterans have earned their benefits by putting their lives on the line for our country.
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* According to “Inflation Indexation in Major Federal Benefit Programs: Impact of the Chained CPI,” Alison Shelton, AARP Public Policy Institute, March 2013. http://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/research/public_policy_institute/econ_sec/2013/impact-of-chained-cpi-federal-programs-fs-AARP-ppi-econ-sec.pdf