There’s a date sitting out there that every one of us born after the war ought to know.
Late 2032.
That’s when the trust fund that pays our Social Security checks is projected to run dry.
If nothing changes by then, every check in America gets cut by about 22 percent.
Not just future retirees. Us. The folks already drawing.
Look at your own check and take a fifth of it away. That’s what’s on the table if Congress keeps sitting on its hands.
Six years. That’s all the runway we’ve got.
Now, I’ve watched Washington long enough to know how this goes.
They’ll wait. They’ll wait until the last minute, the way they did in 1983, and then they’ll scramble.
And when they scramble, somebody pays.
The question is who.
Here’s something most folks don’t know about how Social Security gets paid for.
Every working person pays a tax on their wages into the system. The cashier pays it. The truck driver pays it. The nurse pays it.
They pay it on every dollar they earn.
But that tax stops at a ceiling. Right now it’s around $184,500 a year.
Every dollar a person earns past that line pays nothing more into Social Security.
Think about what that means.
A man making fifty thousand a year pays on all fifty thousand.
A man making five million a year stops paying in the first couple of weeks of January.
The rest of the year, his paycheck is free and clear of the tax that keeps our checks coming.
That’s not an accident. Somebody wrote it that way.
And it’s been that way while the money at the top of this country has piled up higher than it’s been in a hundred years.
There was a time when this country asked more of the people at the very top.
In the 1950s, the top income tax rate was 91 percent.
It stayed at 70 percent or higher all the way to 1981.
Now, I’ll be honest with you. Hardly anybody paid that full rate. The law was full of loopholes.
But the principle was clear. The more this country gave you, the more you gave back.
That was the deal we grew up under.
That was the country that built the highways, the schools, and the middle class most of us came up through.
Somewhere along the way, that deal got rewritten.
Not by us.
So here’s what I’m asking.
We’re the generation that’s drawing. We’re also the generation that votes.
Folks our age show up at the polls more than anybody else in America. Every congressman knows that. Every senator knows it.
That’s not nothing. That’s leverage.
And we’re about to have a fresh crop of them after the midterms.
They’ll walk into that Capitol with six years of runway and no excuses left.
That’s when we bark.
I’m talking to both sides here.
The Democrats have a bill. It’s been sitting there for years. It lifts that ceiling so the highest earners pay in on more of what they make.
They need to stop talking about it at rallies and start moving it.
We need to call them, write them, and show up at their town halls and say: you said you’d protect it, so protect it.
Don’t let them hide behind the other side.
Don’t let them wait until 2031 and call it an emergency.
And here’s the hard truth that goes with it.
No fix for Social Security passes with one party alone.
It takes sixty votes in the Senate. That means some folks across the aisle have to come along.
So we bark at them too.
There are Republicans who’ve already said out loud that this has to be fixed. Hold them to it.
A man who says the right thing in June and votes the wrong way in December ought to hear about it from every senior in his district.
This isn’t about tearing anybody down.
It’s about who carries the load.
Right now, the plan if nobody acts is simple. We take the cut. The people who can least afford it carry the whole thing.
That’s the default. That’s what happens if we stay quiet.
I don’t think we should stay quiet.
Think about what this generation has done in its time.
We marched. We built. We raised families. We worked jobs that wore our bodies out.
We paid into this system our whole lives, every paycheck, without being asked twice.
This may be the last big thing we get to stand up for.
Not just for us.
For our kids, who are paying in right now and wondering if anything will be there when their turn comes.
For our grandkids, who haven’t even started.
If we don’t fix it while we’ve still got a voice, they’ll inherit a broken promise with our name on it.
So here’s the job.
Find out who your congressman is. Find out who your senators are.
Write them down. Put them on the refrigerator.
After the midterms, when the new crowd settles in, write them a letter.
Not an email they delete. A letter, with your name and your town on it.
Tell them you’re drawing Social Security. Tell them you vote. Tell them you want that ceiling lifted so the folks at the top pay in like the rest of us did.
Then do it again in a month.
And again.
One old voice is easy to ignore.
Fifty million of them aren’t.
We’ve got one more bark left in us.
Let’s make it count.
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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