What Republicans have
actually said about cuts to
Social Security and
Medicare
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.):
“All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” the document said.
This would require Congress to renew Social Security and Medicare every five years. Scott’s proposal also called for a yearly report from Congress “telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt.”
When Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) initially ran for Senate in 2010, he called for the complete elimination of Social Security.
“It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it,” Lee said at a campaign event in 2010, adding, “There’s going to be growing pains associated with doing this. We can’t do it all at once.”
However, the Utah Republican appears to have since tempered his views on entitlement programs.
“I don’t recall ever having advocated for dismantling those — that’s sensitive stuff,” he said in an October interview with the Daily Herald.
😂
Similar to Scott, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has suggested that Congress regularly renew the entitlement programs. However, Johnson has proposed that it be done on an annual basis.
“I’ve been saying for as long as I’ve been here that we should transfer everything, put everything on budget so we have to consider it if every year. I’ve said that consistently, it’s nothing new,” Johnson told “The Regular Joe Show” podcast last August.
The Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in the House, has called for increasing the threshold for Medicare to 67 years of age and Social Security to 70 years of age in an effort to avoid the programs’ trust funds from becoming insolvent, per its fiscal 2023 budget. The group includes more than 150 Republican members of the House, the majority of the GOP caucus.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested in a debate in June that a bipartisan compromise on the issue will likely mean that “people like me are going to have to take a little less and pay a little more in.”
Take a "little less" of your money out of the bank and "pay a little more in". 😁
Like the Republican Study Committee, he also suggested adjusting the qualifying age for Social Security and Medicare upward.
“We’re going to have to adjust the age one more time like Ronald Reagan and Tip — Tip O’Neil did.”
