A new bill introduced by Senators Blackburn and Marshall aimed at lowering taxability of Social Security benefits would …
Redirect funds from inefficient government spending in non-defense, non-veterans and non-homeland security discretionary appropriations accounts.
“This ensures the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are safeguarded while prioritizing retirees.”
Pure nonsense. It safeguards nothing.
This puts Social Security right in the mix of political budget wrangling based on questionable assumptions at a point in time.
This was one of the great fears held by FDR and why SS funding was set up as it was.
It’s smoke and mirrors, political games.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
Al Lindquist is right. This bill corrects what was a bad deal forced on SS recipients back in the 80s. The taxation should have been inflation adjusted at that time.
Quinn, you harp on political wrangling whenever Social Security funding is mentioned. The whole program is a political construct and has been tinkered with and tampered with many times since inception. Get over it. At least in this bill proposal there was some action proposed to toss funds toward the program.
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You miss the key point which is using general revenue funds which in this case are questionable if even permanent. You don’t want to change the basic funding structure via FICA separated funds. Change the taxation point, but make up the lost revenue the way the program was intended.
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Al Lindquist
does a great service by raising the tax limit and then adjusting for inflation–right now a single person is taxed at $25,000 of income–that would go to $34,000–
so Mrs. Smith the teacher in your building who has a NJ pension but also worked for years in a private sector job and paid into SS gets her benefit based on what she paid in (new law passed and signed by the corpse) and is taxed on any income/dividends beginning at $34,000–hell, everything else is inflation adjusted why not this.
If married the $32,000 taxable base now increases to $68,000–sounds good to me.
will politicians send money to the trust fund? you are correct–probably will not happen because the system is political–even a better reason to look to privatize it for our grandchildren.
“the death knell of SS”–the lefties usually tell us folks will die unless we adopt their thinking and legislation so your title did not surprise me–if not death we are told; “it’s for the children”.
The Dept. of ED has been a death knell for our children–since Carter and the NEA/AFT joined forces test scores have gone down and down further.
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