" Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick suggested this week that only ‘fraudsters’ would complain about missing a monthly Social Security check, and that most people wouldn’t mind if the government simply skipped a payment. — Axios
People are overreacting that the Trump administration’s planned overhauls of the Social Security Administration could lead to delayed or missed Social Security payments and cause senior citizens hardship. Take my ninety-four-year-old mother-in-law, Barbara—if her check didn’t come as scheduled, she wouldn’t even complain—because she would soon be dead.
Unlike most older people in this country, Barbara doesn’t sit around defrauding the American taxpayer—namely, herself, who paid Social Security taxes her whole life—by living on an income so fixed that if her Social Security check was even a few days delayed it would cause bills to go unpaid, late fees to be assessed, and her entire financial future to depend on the outcome of Wheel of Fortune’s My$tery Wedge 10K Giveaway.
No, she would be totally fine without her check. Barbara is not one of those self-important elderly people who need to eat food to survive. She can subsist solely on quartered containers of yogurt and the knowledge that she is fulfilling her patriotic duty to, as the president said, make sacrifices in the short term that will pay off later. So if she can just forego eating for the days, weeks, or months it will take to undo all of the avoidable mistakes the administration will make in trying to change Social Security, she will certainly be able to afford food again, after she has passed away due to malnutrition.
And she doesn’t worry about running out of medication, either, because she knows she can just ration it for a little while if she needs to, for the sake of the country. If she just has one small stroke per day after she runs out of blood pressure medication instead of one massive stroke on the first day, she may be able to go on living for up to a week before she still dies anyway.
If she can just keep her mouth shut and die, why can’t everyone else on Social Security do the same? It just goes to show that people who would complain about a missed check are fraudsters who feel entitled to Social Security just because it is an entitlement program. What’s next? Older Americans who also feel entitled to affordable health care from the Medicare program just because it is also an entitlement program they have paid into their whole lives?
Barbara is a woman who gets by on her gumption, not by sitting around waiting for a handout. She knows that if someday, probably very soon, her check doesn’t arrive, she could just call up her billionaire treasury secretary son-in-law and ask for some money. And if it turns out she doesn’t have such a son-in-law (sorry, Barb!), then at least she will die knowing her daughter is very happy with a nice man whom she totally doesn’t care isn’t rich.
My mother-in-law is representative of the many older Americans who I am sure will be on the right side of history by falling in line with a corrupt government trying to dismantle a program that is universally popular across party lines, ultimately dying in the process.
As ol’ Barb always says, “It’s shameful to use a made-up story about me to score political points; I never said any of this.”