Cartoon Republicans Move To Gut Social Security Benefits on Their First Day in Power

Dear Americans: this is what you got when you skipped out on voting last November:

Republican opponents of Social Security have not wasted even a single day in their plan to dismantle Social Security brick by brick. What should be a dry, mundane exercise -- the adoption of new rules by the newly convening House of Representatives -- has turned into a stealth attack on America's working families.
As one of their first orders of business, the House Republicans approved a rule preventing routine reallocation of Social Security funds to those men, women and children who receive Social Security Disability, unless such a reallocation is accompanied by either benefit cuts or tax increases:

The House on Tuesday passed legislation laying out parliamentary rules for the year. The bill included a little-noticed provision blocking Congress from shifting funds to prevent a 2016 shortfall in Social Security's disability insurance program.

The Social Security Administration's actuaries have projected that the disability insurance program's trust fund will run out of money next year, resulting in a 20 percent benefit reduction for nearly 11 million Americans.

Because the Republicans will never agree to raise taxes (specifically on high-income earners or corporations), what that does is set the stage for benefit cuts in the coming two years. Because the disability trust fund is set to run dry next year, allowing the program to collect payroll taxes sufficient to pay only about 80% of benefits. In real-world terms, that means those eleven million people who receive SS Disability will likely see their benefits cut as much as 20% by the Republican Party.

Such reallocations are part of the normal course of administering the Social Security Trust fund and have occurred eleven times since 1968. There is nothing "unusual" about the reallocation procedure. What is unusual is a Congress occupied by fanatics who couldn't care less about the needs of ordinary Americans:

Reallocating the income, however, would keep both the old-age and disability programs solvent until at least 2033, giving Congress plenty of time to assess the programs' needs and work out a long-term fix.