What follows is a transcript of the above video:
Hey guys, I want to debunk a lie that’s being told about President Trump’s social security plan, which is that his plan will bankrupt social security and do so within a few years. It’s important the facts because this is getting a lot of press. It’s getting a lot of attention and we need to be able to defend President Trump and really just always defend against fake news. Okay. And make no mistake about it, the idea that President Trump’s social security plan will bankrupt social security is absolutely false. And I don’t mean it’s an economic fallacy that different economists can analyze different numbers and come to a disagreement. I mean, it’s just a lie, which results from people taking his words out of context and ignoring the important parts because there’s an election and the left wants to scare seniors.
Now let’s be clear. Trump has suggested eliminating payroll taxes, and it is true that if you were to eliminate payroll taxes, that social security would go bankrupt within a few years, but only if you didn’t pay for it some other way. Trump’s plan is not simply to eliminate social security taxes, but to replace funding for social security directly from the government’s general fund. And here’s the irony. If anything, this would actually be a lot more progressive. This is something the left should support because presently the 12% payroll tax that funds social security is regressive, imposed as it is on all income up to $137,000 a year, regardless of your tax bracket.
So someone who normally pays a 0% tax or even a negative tax rate still has to pay the 12% tax. And any income above $137,000 is not taxed at all for payroll purposes. So get this, the guy who earns $137,000 a year pays the exact same amount of money into social security as Bill Gates because they’re both getting the same benefit. But what Trump wants to do, his plan’s this. He says by shifting from a payroll tax plan, okay, where everyone’s got to pay that 12% up to 137,000 and money above that isn’t taxed at all, by shifting away from the payroll tax to a general revenues plan, okay, where the top 1% pay 1/3 of the taxes, the top 20% pay 80% of the taxes and the top half pay, basically all the taxes. Trump’s plan actually proposes to take the burden of social security off of the poor and middle class and place it almost exclusively on the higher earners, but please everyone, let’s not let facts get in the way of useful lies.
Here’s the other thing everyone’s missing. There is no actual money in the social security trust fund to be depleted in the first place, all of the money in the social security trust fund is actually loaned to the government the moment it gets there to fund general revenues and replaced with treasury bonds. So if you were to go into the actual social security trust fund right now, and think that there’s money there, there is no money there. There’s just a bunch of IOUs in the form of treasury bonds. We just have to hope the government pays it back. The socialization purity trust money is already going to the general fund and is paid back already with general revenues. That’s the irony of all this. Well, that, and the fact that what Trump is proposing is actually a progressive tax. He’s actually supporting getting rid of a regressive tax that the left is supposed to hate and replacing it with a progressive tax that they’re supposed to like.
And all of these, by the way, are just more reasons why social security is just the most flawed scheme ever developed. It’s basically a Ponzi scheme that if any financial institution were to run it, at best, no one would voluntarily sign up for and at worst, it would be outright illegal. It steals millions of dollars from every participant as measured against the returns they would get if they just put their money in a passively managed S&P 500 fund. But, that’s a whole other video for a whole other time. The bottom line is for the purposes of this video, just understand that the idea that President Trump is going to bankrupt social security is not only false, he’s actually doing the thing that the left would do if they were in power, which is make it a more progressive tax as opposed to the regressive one that’s already. All right. Thanks for watching guys.
