President Donald Trump made big promises to Social Security recipients, and now his latest proposal is an acknowledgement that he wrote a check he can't cash, wrote Ryan Teague Beckwith for MSNBC.
Trump's "big, beautiful bill" combining tax cuts with energy deregulation and border security, which already appears to be in trouble as Republicans from every faction voice objections, includes a so-called "senior bonus" that gives people over 65 who don't itemize their taxes an extra $4,000 deduction. That goes down for people making over $75,000 per person or $150,000 per couple.
This seems like a generous deal, Beckwith wrote — but it's actually a pittance meant to placate voters over his failure with a big Social Security proposal.
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For one thing, he wrote, a $4,000 deduction "sounds larger than it actually is."
"Older adults are not going to get the equivalent of four grand, as they would if it were a tax credit, which directly reduces your bill. They would just get to reduce their taxable income by that amount. So older adults with the median household income of $50,290 would pay taxes as though they were making $46,290. That's nice, but not a huge difference. Oh, and it would end in 2028."
This plan, which amounts to about $71 billion in tax breaks, is far short of Trump's actual campaign pledge to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, which have been treated as taxable since the 1980s to keep the program solvent. There have been bipartisan proposals to undo this tax for years, but Trump's version would "reduce the money coming into the trust fund by an estimated $1.6 trillion to $1.8 trillion over the next decade without providing any new sources of revenue" — and it became clear to Republicans writing the bill that they simply couldn't offset cuts that large, even as they took a $600 billion hacksaw to Medicaid.
This idea, along with so many of Trump's other huge plans like eliminating taxes on tips, overtime, and car loans, couldn't make the cut, he wrote — but Trump knew he couldn't leave his supporters with nothing, so he and his Republican allies "finally turned to the table full of wonks, who came up with the 'senior bonus' as a sop to older voters that would cost a more reasonable $71 billion (in large part because, again, it would end in 2028)."
The senior bonus idea is "not terrible," Beckwith wrote — but only because it walked back Trump's much larger promise.
