On Tuesday, writing for The Washington Post, columnist Paul Waldman outlined how President Donald Trump's executive action to defer the payroll tax is blowing up in his face — and becoming a weapon for the Joe Biden campaign.
"When it turned out that Congress had no interest in cutting the tax — which funds Social Security — Trump issued an executive order allowing businesses to temporarily defer the tax," wrote Waldman. "But then both large businesses and small businesses mostly said, 'Thanks, but no thanks' to Trump’s idea, because implementing it would create a bureaucratic hassle and then their employees would be on the hook to pay back the deferred taxes next year. When they figured out that few businesses were interested, the administration decided to force 1.3 million federal workers to take the deferral whether they wanted it or not, sparking outrage from employee unions and protests from Democrats."
"But far worse is something Trump said to calm fears about workers being stuck with a big tax bill in 2021," wrote Waldman. "If he wins the election, Trump vowed, he will 'terminate the payroll tax.' He added: 'We'll be paying into Social Security through the general fund.' That would be a monumental change in how we pay for a program that costs over a trillion dollars a year, which is why White House aides rushed to say that Trump really didn’t mean what he said and instead meant only to say that he’d make permanent the cuts in his executive order."
As Waldman noted, Biden has warned in attack ads against Trump that this amounts to destroying Social Security — although some fact-checkers dispute this characterization, since Trump has sought to claim he'd find an alternative means of funding.
"Seniors who rely on Social Security to live are ... the age group most likely to vote Republican; according to the Pew Research Center, voters over 65 voted for Trump by a nine-point margin in 2016," wrote Waldman. "More important, they made up 27 percent of the electorate in 2016. Compare that with voters under 30, who were hugely pro-Democrat but made up only 13 percent of the electorate despite being the same size as seniors as a proportion of the voting-eligible population."
"Back in 2016, Trump claimed he’d protect Social Security; it would be a stretch to say he meant anything by it beyond his general inclination to promise everything to everyone. But now he really is saying he’ll undermine this spectacularly successful and popular program in a dramatic way," concluded Waldman. "Does he mean that either? Maybe not. But you can’t blame Biden for taking him at his word."
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