March 12, 2024
We know that the media are busy covering the fact that President Biden is 81, but if they ever have a reporter, or maybe an intern, with a few spare minutes perhaps they could ask Donald Trump about his plans for cutting Social Security and Medicare. On Monday, Trump indicated his desire to cut these programs, saying on a television show:
“Tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement ….” “First of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of, also, the theft and bad management of entitlements, …”
Later, his campaign referred reporters to a post that they had made on Twitter:
“If you losers didn’t cut his answer short, you would know President Trump was talking about cutting waste,”
As is common for Trump, his statement is not very coherent, but since the media practice affirmative action for the lazy sons of billionaires, that fact will likely not get much attention. But he does seem to be talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.
But let’s follow the path suggested by his campaign. Trump wants to eliminate waste. It would be good if the media could press Trump on what waste he sees in these programs.
In the case of Social Security, the administrative costs of the program come to less than 0.4 percent of the benefits that are paid out each year. This is around one-thirtieth of the fees that private sector 401(k)s charge.
But let’s say that Trump can find waste that he somehow overlooked in his first term, how much can he hope to save, will he reduce administrative costs by a quarter, by a third, by half? In that incredibly optimistic scenario, he would reduce the cost of the program by 0.2 percent. That would barely affect any of the numbers in the Social Security projections.
What about the “theft?” Well again, one has to wonder why he let this “theft” go unchallenged in his four years in the White House, but it would be good if Trump could give us some idea of what sort of theft he has in mind. Otherwise, we might think this is just like his tens of thousands of dead people voting in Georgia, or his 30,000 sq foot condo that is actually 10,000 sq feet, in other words, a complete figment of Trump’s imagination.
We do know that many people have sought to find theft in the Social Security program. In 2013, the Washington Post famously ran a huge front page article, that also took up the entire back page, which revealed that the program had paid 0.006 percent of its benefits over the prior three years to dead people. According to the article, roughly half of this money was repaid. It seems that the main issue was that family members often did not report the death of a beneficiary immediately and may have received a check or two after the person’s death, something that is easily imaginable in the era of direct deposit.
But let’s suppose that Trump’s vigilance can reduce the amount lost in payments to dead people by 50 percent, or 0.0015 percent of total payments. That would not go far towards reducing the program’s costs, but on the plus side the impact would be so small we wouldn’t have to change any of the numbers in the Trustees projections.
The prospect for savings is not much better on the Medicare side. Here it is worth noting that cost projections have come down hugely over the last quarter century and especially since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Healthcare spending has largely leveled off as a share of GDP and even fallen somewhat in the last few years.
Perhaps Donald Trump thinks he has some magic wand that will reduce Medicare costs further. The media should treat Trump like a serious candidate and ask him what his trick is, and why he didn’t use it in his first term in office.
Medicare and Social Security are really big deals. There are more than 60 million beneficiaries of both programs and tens of millions more people expect to be receiving these benefits in the next ten or fifteen years. If Donald Trump wants to cut these programs people have a right to know.
We all know it’s very important that Joe Biden is 81, but maybe the media could shift its focus for just a few minutes to tell people about Donald Trump’s plans for Social Security and Medicare. Voters should be able to know before they cast their votes.
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