Right Attacks Social Security; Elon Musk is cozying up to Trump

The right-wing attack on Social Security is un-American

Right-wing ideologues are perpetrating a three-pronged fraud to delegitimize Social Security, cut its benefits, and then—zzzzz—kill it.

First, they tried to demonize our public pension program as a socialist horror. That didn’t work, because this pension works in every sense of the word, allowing millions of American families to escape old-age poverty.

So they scream in lie number two: “Social Security is bankrupt – you future retirees will be left penniless in old age!” Uh. . . NO. The majority of pension benefits are covered by payroll taxes, which continue to flow, so the program is in no danger of collapsing at all.

Well, they cry in lie number three, even to maintain the life support program it would have to be gutted by raising people’s retirement age to seventy or older and cutting monthly payments to retirees.

Uh. . . My goodness, no again. Such visceral thinking would be immoral—half of American workers receive no retirement benefits other than Social Security. Moreover, such insensitivity is completely unnecessary, because there is an obvious, simple and fair solution: Apply Social Security Tax to Everyone!

While workers pay this tax on every dollar they earn, millionaires and billionaires are only taxed on the first $170,000 of their astronomical salary. Take Elon Musk, the richest man in America, who claimed one $45 billion paycheck last year. But under current law, he only pays $170,000 of that in Social Security taxes — meaning $44,999,830,000 of his income remains tax-free. Why shouldn’t he pay like everyone else?

Tax everyone equally – the rich as well as the working class – so that everyone can have a secure and dignified retirement. This is what the American concept of the common good means.

Will Elon betray Donald first or vice versa?

When I saw two inflated egos like Elon Musk and Donald Trump recently embracing each other in their political marriage of convenience, I thought, “Boy, there are two who really deserve each other!” The only question is who will betray the other first.

I’m betting on Musk. Yes, Trump has built his entire career on the art of high-profile betrayal, from real estate scams to marriages. But Musk’s blatant duplicity is even more obvious (please excuse this image). He routinely shifts his core beliefs from one “rock-solid principle” to the opposite and coldly turns against trusting partners and allies, all out of personal interest.

Take, for example, his condemnation of President Joe Biden’s 2022 climate proposal, which promised massive support for the electric vehicles Musk sold. Just a year earlier, Tesla’s CEO said he was “super excited” about Joe’s plan. But his ego was roiled by some perceived insults from Biden, so he called for scrapping the entire climate initiative and smugly declared that Tesla didn’t need public money.

Ha! Far from being a corporate genius who grew out of nothing, Musk is the lucky son of a South African emerald dealer. He didn’t create Tesla, he bought it and then enriched himself by depriving American taxpayers of huge subsidies and recklessly defrauding workers and suppliers. Tesla’s first factory was built with half a billion federal dollars, he has so far drawn $9 billion from a public regulatory fund, every car he sells receives up to $7,500 in federal subsidies – and he continues to receive about a billion each year of taxes violates the Biden law, which he condemned.

Musk says it’s all ethical because the money is there for the taking. Yes – and that also applies to his integrity.