Sen. Bernie Sanders laid into the Republicans and their calls to raise the retirement age and means test Social Security on Wolf Blitzer's show this Thursday:
On CNN’s Wolf, Sanders said, Look, what Perry and these other guys are talking about, this is the decade-long attack on Social Security by the Republican Party. They want to privatize it eventually. They want to make cuts. We have millions of seniors struggling twelve, thirteen, fourteen thousand dollars a year. I will not accepting cutting Social Security.”
Blitzer asked Sanders about means testing and if millionaires and benefits deserve to get benefits. The Democratic presidential candidate answered, “They’re not talking about millionaires and billionaires. They’re talking about lowering it to forty thousand dollars a year…It’s a universal program. Everybody deserves to put into it. Everybody deserves to get a benefit out of it. We can extend that program by not asking anybody more than the top two percent to contribute into it.”
Republicans love to talk about “saving Social Security” and entitlement reform. What they don’t tell the American people is that they plan to save the program by killing it. Republicans oppose raising the earnings cap so that wealthy Americans pay more into the fund. What they support is imposing means testing requirements that will take Social Security away from anyone earning a middle-class income. In short, Republicans want to kill Social Security.
Unlike the GOP, Sanders actually has a plan to keep it solvent that doesn't involve asking Americans to work until they drop dead.
Bernie Sanders wants wealthy to pay for Social Security expansion:
Half of the country, 165 million Americans, accept Social Security in some form. Therefore, reforming the nearly bankrupt wealth transfer program is never popular among politicians.
But Bernie Sanders, a socialist Senator from Vermont who is running for President as a Democrat, told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he plans to expand Social Security if he was elected President.
"You don't cut Social Security to save Social Security," Sanders said. He said the US should lift the cap on payments to Social Security. The retirement program caps payments on incomes above $118,500.
"Someone is making $118,000 per year and someone is making $10 million per year. They're paying the same amount of money into the Social Security Trust Fund. You lift that cap and you start asking people above $250,000 a year to start paying more into system. Social Security can be extended and we should expand benefits." [...]
Republicans have called for a variety of reforms to protect Social Security, including raising the retirement age, reducing benefits or allowing personal retirement accounts where workers can invest in the stock market. But Sanders believes this is an attack on Social Security which, along with Medicare, is the nations' largest expense.
"It's a universal program. Everybody deserves to put into it, everybody deserves to get a benefit out of it," Sanders said. "We can extend that program by not asking anybody more than the top two percent to contribute more into it."
