By Laurel Duggan
Daily Caller News Foundation
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders urged President Joe Biden to boost Social Security payouts and expand payroll taxes in order to fund the program for the next 75 years, according to The Washington Post.
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Sanders pitched his plan during a private Jan. 25 meeting in the Oval Office, and Biden’s response was was noncommittal, according to the Post. Biden has pledged to block any Republican attempts to cut Social Security, but he’s been less forthcoming about how he plans to fund the program, which is expected to run a $21 trillion shortfall over the next 30 years, according to Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Riedl.
Sanders’ plan, which he’s proposed once again in a bill he reintroduced in January, involved levying new payroll taxes on earnings over $160,000 and raising annual Social Security payments by $2,400 per recipient.
The White House has been working behind the scenes to determine whether they should advocate for any specific policies on Social Security and other entitlement programs rather than simply condemning Republicans who have suggested cuts, according to the Post. White House aides have proposed payroll taxes on the wealthy, but Biden hasn’t endorsed that plan, according to anonymous sources cited by the Post.
Taxing the wealthy won’t necessarily solve Biden’s entitlement funding problem, according to Riedl; even if Congress imposed state and payroll tax rates nearing 100% for wealthy taxpayers through upper tax bracket rate hikes, high-worth asset taxes and a raised corporate tax rate, the new tax revenue still couldn’t fund the next three decades of Social Security and Medicare as the programs currently exist, according to Riedl.
“The biggest threats to Social Security and Medicare are House and Senate Republican efforts to gut a program millions of Americans have been paying into since their first jobs as teenagers,” the White House told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The President has already helped pass the two most significant bills to lower health care costs in Medicare in generations, through the Affordable Care Act and Inflation Reduction Act, and has promised more to keep Medicare solvent in his budget, but he won’t budge on paying every penny of the benefits to Americans that have earned them. We look forward to Republicans sharing their plan with the American people as well, since they have promised to pass a budget this year.”
Sanders did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
This article has been updated with comment from the White House.
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Long the world’s most Christian nation, America today is being taken over by a new “official” national religion, one being imposed on the entire populace by every major societal institution, from government, media and big tech, to academia, entertainment and business.
This new state religion is Wokeism. “Going woke” conjures up visions of someone claiming to be acutely sensitive (“awake”) to “systemic social and political injustice.” And not just alleged bigotry against blacks, but toward every other “minority” as well, from LGBT folk – especially everything transgender and “nonbinary” – to “undocumented immigrants.” All of them, being VICTIMS, intrinsically more virtuous than the shameful oppressor class: primarily heterosexual white males.
This new “woke” consciousness has turned America upside-down – from the nationwide Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, to tearing down of historic monuments, to demanding multi-million-dollar reparation payments for blacks, to appointing transgenders as top government officials, to rampant reverse discrimination in every area of life, to the U.S. military imposing mandatory “diversity training” and transgender pronoun use on all personnel, causing recruitment to disastrously plummet.
Yet there is hope. Being “saved” – which in Wokeism is called being “woke” – is largely a matter of worshipping victimhood by becoming an “ally” and “defender” of all the many victim classes, and a determined enemy of the straight white male oppressor class. Thus, “joining the righteous” as an ally – even if one is cursed to be a straight white male – opens the door mercifully for salvation, even to the most wretched.
That is the power of the religion of Wokeism. And it’s explored as never before in the February 2023 issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine. If you’ve ever wondered, for example, exactly how the most radical elements in American society are successfully pressuring the biggest corporations into adopting the most outrageous and immoral policies imaginable, even when doing so permanently damages and devalues the company, the stunning answers are in this issue of Whistleblower, titled “WOKEISM: AMERICA’S OFFICIAL STATE RELIGION.”
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