 Yes, and you know, the spent spending has always been discretionary, the VA spending is discretionary. What's mandatory are things like social security and Medicare. If you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost. And our problem in this country is that more than 70% of our federal budget or our federal spending is all mandatory spending. It's on automatic pilot. You just don't do proper oversight. You don't get in there and fix the programs going bankrupt. It's just on automatic pilot. What we ought to be doing is we ought to turn everything into discretionary spending so it's all evaluated so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken that are going to be going bankrupt. You just heard Republican Senator from Wisconsin Ron Johnson admit that he wants to rob you. He wants to take money out of programs that you already paid into. Are you okay with that? Because I certainly am not. Now, if you don't know any better, it's easy to be misled by these deceitful politicians. He claimed that, you know, doing this, switching social security from being automatically funded every single year to being part of our discretionary budget is just a way that we politicians who you definitely trust can make annual adjustments to in order to make sure that it is, you know, solvent, except what does he really want to do? He wants to cut social security. It's really, really clear. Now, cutting social security is like the first thing that he wants to do. But really what this would do is open the door to privatizing social security because this has been a long term goal of Wall Street backed politicians. Wall Street has been salivating over Social Security for decades now. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush. So many politicians have tried to cut Social Security, but they have failed every single time because they know how popular this program is. So how do you allow Wall Street to get their hands on Social Security? How do you privatize it? Well first, you have to convince people that it is going bankrupt and there must be a fix that is made immediately in order to save the program. Now sure, there is a fix that you can make and we'll talk about that, but really what they want to do is cut Social Security, fuck up the program, drive down satisfaction so that way voters are more open to the idea of potentially privatizing Social Security. That would be a disaster. Now, as Common Dreams explains, it's not the first time Johnson has attacked Social Security. Just last year, he called the program a Ponzi scheme and has previously supported legislation that would raise the retirement age for seniors and backed other GOP proposals to increase out-of-pocket spending by Medicare beneficiaries. So he already failed to convince anyone that he's serious about protecting Social Security when he called it a fucking Ponzi scheme. If you believe that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, you should be nowhere near that policy. And as Mark Pokan points out, you know the money you've paid all your life out of your paycheck for Social Security and Medicare? Senator Ron Johnson wants to steal your money and potentially cut benefits from both. That's a more extreme position than almost anyone in the U.S. Senate. Time for Mandela Barnes, which is his Democratic opponent. Now the reason why that tweet is important is because it's correct. This is the most vocally extreme position. A lot of lawmakers, including Democrats, probably agree with Ron Johnson, but they're too afraid to say it. Because again, if you cut Social Security, something that most older voters rely on and all of us will rely on, then you lose them. So the way that they undermine Social Security, it's all covertly. They're incredibly disingenuous and you have to watch out for them. Now part of the problem is that the media is complicit and they'll create these headlines about how Social Security is bound to go bankrupt in the year 2035 when in actuality that's not the full picture. U.S. Vance Larson explains until recently, money collected from paychecks covered all payments to retirees and even allowed for the growth of a large trust fund. These reserve funds were relatively modest from program creation in the 1930s through the mid-1980s. However, as the baby boomer generation entered the workforce, a large number of workers for every retiree allowed the fund to swell from $109 billion in 1988 to nearly $3 trillion today. The trust fund balance is now beginning to decrease as a result of demographic changes and improved life expectancy. Baby boomers are now at or near retirement and as such, there are fewer workers for every retiree. According to analysts at the Nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, the trust fund will be depleted in approximately 12 years' time, assuming no policy changes are made. For those not familiar with the particulars of how Social Security is financed, it is easy to see how these claims and headlines may cause worry about whether they can rely on the program for retirement income. After 2034, based on current projections, Social Security will only be able to pay about 78% of benefits. This is of course problematic, but certainly not an indication that in 2034 payments will stop flowing entirely. For the last 30-plus years, most of the money withheld from paychecks went directly to current retirees with the surplus contributing to the trust fund balance. Moving forward, money will still be coming in to cover most of the obligations, just not all of them. Congress should pass the Act known as Social Security 2100 as sacred trust, which would change the earnings subject to taxation. Currently, only income below $147,000 is taxed, meaning an individual making $150,000 annually pays as much Social Security tax as Russell Wilson. This bill would subject income above $400,000 to the payroll tax, taking this action would increase taxes on a small portion of wealthy Americans and ensure a better retirement outlook for millions of American seniors. So in other words, all that you have to do in order to keep Social Security fully funded for the foreseeable future is lift the cap on taxable income. That's it. But for whatever reason, this easy fix isn't being proposed by these politicians. Why? Because their donors told them that they want it privatized. So what do you do? You fuck it up. You make sure that it is less popular by making cuts to it, to making it seem less efficient, and you open the door to privatization. Yeah. Isn't it a little bit weird how we keep hearing about the same 12-year timeline with regard to Social Security? For example, look at the CNBC article. So they correctly point out that Social Security isn't bankrupt, but they say the new depletion date is 2035, a year later than projected last year. Very interesting how that works. So as of 2022, the new projected depletion date of Social Security is supposedly 2035. Now by depletion, I just mean that it won't be able to pay out 100% of benefits. But what's interesting is that in 2022, the depletion date was 2034. And in 2020, the depletion date was 2033. Now I don't have a crystal ball or anything, but let me just make a guess here. And you can come back and check this next year. By 2033, the, or excuse me, by 2023, by next year, the new depletion date will be 2036. By 2024, the new depletion date will be 2037. You get the point that I'm making. It just continues to roll over, right? So again, that's not to say that there isn't fixes that need to be made. Yes, we need to lift the cap on taxable income. The problem is that all of this hysteria over Social Security going bankrupt is nothing more than a ploy to privatize it, to propose a fix that will ultimately break Social Security. So when senators like Ron Johnson tell you their plans, you should believe them. If you are a senior citizen and you rely on Social Security Medicare and you continue to vote for these Republican politicians who make it known what they want to do with your retirement, you shouldn't support them. Blake Masters is another candidate. He just won his GOP primary who's talking about reforms to Social Security, i.e. cutting or privatizing Social Security. So pay attention because this is what they do. They know that they can't just directly privatize Social Security because it's too popular of a program. So if they drive down support and ultimately break this program, that's how you open the door to letting Wall Street get their disgusting little hands on this program. So we can't let that happen. And in order to stop this, we have to be vigilant and informed about what they're doing and the way that they try to sell you these types of schemes. It's by fear mongering and it shouldn't work because it's not true.