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Comment by throwthere | Hacker News Reader

Hard to discuss this without getting political and violating all sorts of decorum but, I guess, the system worked here?

The original White House tweet:

  > “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership

The reality: Inflation triggered an automatic increase in social security benefits because of a 1972 law that indexes social security checks to cost of living.

I guess it's odd claiming you did good thing X, when in reality it was bad thing Y that automatically caused good thing X. But even that's not right, because in inflation-adjusted terms, good thing X actually wasn't good at all, it was just neutral.

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People were saying this exact thing under the tweet. So that's probably why it was deleted.

I agree this is weird. I guess it is meant to highlight the other party wants to get rid of social security. It is strange though to take credit for not doing something that someone else says they will do in the future.

> the other party wants to get rid of social security

You should not repeat fake news. This isn't true. Promulgating made-up narratives does not help anyone.

> is meant to highlight the other party wants to get rid of social security

I didn't know if eliminating social security was actually a part of the republican platform, though it seemed very unlikely.

I googled and found: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/27/false-cla...

Counterpoint from a quick DDG search: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/yes-some-republican-senato...

Tl;Dr: cuts, not elimination

Lee, Johnson and Scott are outside the GOP mainstream on this one. Even historically Republicans who have wanted to “kill SS” have wanted to replace it with something like they have in parts of Texas (https://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2011/05/12/how-...).

Hell, Nixon (before he stepped down) was ready to push for a negative income tax.

Rick Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee - is outside the GOP mainstream. Interesting context.

"Some Republicans" doesn't mean it's the party platform. Some Democrats have advocated nationalization of some social media platforms, that doesn't make it the party platform.

Indeed, and partisan politicians in safe seats also like to float ideas they know don't have a realistic chance of advancing in order to appeal to their ideological base. Every now and then Ted Cruz tweets about "Abolishing the IRS", a prospect I don't think any GOP policymakers are actually willing to fight for. They'll pay lip service to it, however.

The GOP has been against Social Security from the start. Their stated goal has changed variously from privatization, or voluntary enrollment, to simply slashing benefits.

Goldwater, Reagan, Bush all wanted to vastly reduce SS or privatize it completely.

More recently, the GOP congress at the end of Obama's term pushed him hard to compromise on cuts.

In 2016, Trump was unique among GOP presidential candidates in not calling for cuts.

In April of this year, Rick Scott (chair of GOP campaign apparatus) called for adding a "kill switch" on SS, Medicare, and MedicAid. Current minority leader (McCarthy) wants to couple the debt ceiling and social programs.

The only reason the GOP hasn't killed SS yet is because it's a popular program.

Cuts and privatization aren't "getting rid of" which is what this thread is about. It's like when Democrats want to reform something, Republicans will claim Democrats want to get rid of it. Which is false. Same here. I'm pretty sick of it and wish people would stop falling for things like that, when the proposed policies are actually very complex. Would privatization be bad? I don't know, I've never seen a good retort other than "markets have downturns." Would limiting firearms to someone 21+ be bad? I don't think so, but the only thing I hear against it is 18 year olds can be in the military. Those arguments somehow work on people. I guess real gripes about it don't fit into campaign ads or speeches.

Because owning a firearm is a right of the people. If you want to raise the age of adulthood so serving in the military and voting than we can talk about raising the age to own a firearm.

Privatization - SS would be replaced with a pay-as-you-go private account, similar to a 401k. I have seen some suggestions where SS is partially kept, or it becomes optional, either way, it probably kills the system because there won’t be enough money coming into the system to pay out.

There's already not enough money going in. It's going to get worse because no one is having kids.

IMO, this is one reason why illegal immigration gets a blind eye. They work, pay into social security, but can't withdraw.

Easily fixed by removing the cap on the tax. No good reason to have such a regressive plan in place.

They're precursors. Cut programs you don't like until public opinion changes enough for them to be completely dismantled.

> The only reason the GOP hasn't killed SS yet is because it's a popular program.

That's the only reason politicians do anything.

Fair. SS is popular nationally across many socio-economic groupings. It’s almost impossible to touch (unlike something like abortion rights, which are widely supported, yet here we are looking at more bans, effectively the opposite of what the majority wants).

It's important to note that Democrats have been against Social Security since B. Clinton, and have made more than one attempt to privatize it. Obama set up the Bowles-Simpson commission to cut Social Security, and forced a moron like Paul Ryan into the spotlight as an "expert."

Obama is now for Social Security, now that he's out of power and he can make promises that the administration doesn't have to keep.

> Obama set up the Bowles-Simpson commission to cut Social Security

Bowles-Simpson wasn’t about Social Security specifically, and it was set up deliberately with a supermajority rule that assured if it did something controversial, like touched Social Security in an adverse way, it would fail and fall short of the threshold for proposing policy changes at all, doing nothing.

Which is exactly what happened.

Rick Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee

What party wants to get rid of social security? I’m not aware of any party with this in its platform or any major candidates running with this position.

I’ve seen this so much with no evidence, that it now reads like a manufactured talking point.

I’m looking forward to seeing if there are changes in discourse over the next year. Because if Twitter really does go neutral it’ll be a lot harder to push a narrative on Reddit when it’s countered on Twitter. And etc.

Lab leak for example. It was easily to silence that as conspiracy theory when all the players just happen to agree and shut down dissent.

"Through Biden's leadership"

Biden had been in the Senate for like 150 years so who knows maybe he did have some impact there.

Ironically Biden's pre-whitehouse career involved a lot of wanting to make cuts to social security.

He caucused with the last remaining (literal) segregationists and got more votes than Obmama…

So, nothing makes any sense to me.

I mean if we're being fully pedantic, _technically_ it's correct. Biden lead a huge surge in spending, which caused inflation, which caused Social Security checks to increase........

/s because the interenet

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