Despite all the talk about Donald Trump being a unique political figure in American history, there’s one way in which he has behaved like every other politician on the stump: He’s promised not to lay a hand on Social Security.
With more than 67 million Americans collecting stipends now and hundreds of millions more counting on benefits for their retirement, any threat to the system’s benefits sends a shudder through the nation’s workers. That’s why a promise not to cut benefits has become embedded into American politics for most of the program’s nine decades of existence.
But that hasn’t eliminated the threat of benefit cuts, chiefly from Republicans. Social Security’s internal workings are so poorly understood by average voters that numerous possible ways of imposing benefit cuts or otherwise harming the program are hiding in plain sight. Trump mentioned some during his recent presidential campaign and attempted others during his last term.
Here’s the bottom line: It would be folly to be complacent about what the current political majority might do to Social Security.
“There’s a very serious worry on the horizon,” Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley recently told Al Sharpton on MSNBC, “because Donald Trump’s policies would seriously reduce the fiscal health of Social Security …. There’s a lot of talk among people around him about all sorts of gimmicks.”