Top Republican Releases Social Security Plan.
You knew this was going to happen as soon as they gained power - under the guise of “saving” it, they are going to cut future benefits and eligibility as well as make sure that you are incented to work… because you are retired.
Just as the House of Representatives was leaving town on Thursday, veteran Rep. Sam Johnson—chairman of the Ways and Means subcommittee overseeing Social Security—released the Social Security Reform Act of 2016. The timing of the release, on the last day of the current Congress, suggests this was more of an opening volley in the Social Security reform effort. Johnson tells the Washington Examiner that he intended this release as the “start of a fact-based conversation.”
I had been previously unaware, since Donald Trump promised not to cut Social Security and House Speaker Paul Ryan doesn’t touch it in his “A Better Way” agenda, that we (“we”) were starting a conversation on Social Security anytime soon. But such is life under a unified Republican government.
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The plan offers a model for what the GOP would do in a Social Security reform effort. The bill includes 15 specific changes, some of them more complex than others, and this letter from the chief auditor of Social Security analyzes each of them. Broadly: It would cut benefits without raising taxes. Some of the more recognizable changes include a gradual increase in the normal retirement age from 67 to 69 for those born in 1968 or later, and it would peg cost-of-living adjustments to chained CPI, a slower-growing inflation index. There are a lot of technical changes to the benefit formula, as well as additional “work incentives.”