Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday called for scrapping the tax that seniors must pay on their Social Security checks.
“SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY!” the 45th president straightforwardly wrote on Truth Social.
Taxation on Social Security dates back to a bipartisan reform measure signed into law by former President Ronald Reagan in 1983 that was intended to shore up the solvency of the program’s trust fund.
Generally speaking, there is a tax of up to 50% tax on one’s Social Security benefits if total income is between 25,000 and $34,000 – and up to an 85% tax on benefits when income is over $34,000, according to the Social Security Administration.
Trump, 78, made waves in his own party earlier this year with his vow to eliminate taxation on tips. During the Republican National Convention, he recounted how he formulated that proposal during a conversation with a waitress in Nevada.
During his administration, Trump had also mused about slashing payroll taxes, which help fund Social Security, but ultimately, he opted to allow for deferrals. He has recently dangled the possibility of revisiting that in a second term.
Throughout his 2024 campaign, Trump has demanded that Republicans refrain from cutting “a single penny” from Medicare or Social Security.
At one point, he suggested he was open to entitlement reform on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” but his campaign quickly backtracked.
The Republican Party’s platform, which was approved earlier this month and personally written in part by Trump, rules out cuts to Social Security and Medicare, including any potential lifting of the retirement age.
Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office and other organizations have projected that the trust funds behind Social Security and Medicare will run dry at some point by the mid-2030s.
Should that happen, there will be at least an automatic 21% cut to Social Security benefits and an 11% reduction in Medicare Part A benefits — absent any remedies from Congress.
In addition to pitching no taxes on tips and Social Security benefits, Trump has also proposed slashing the corporate tax rate, which sits at 21% down to 15%, a figure he tossed around during his 2016 campaign.
Corporate tax reform was one of his signature legislative accomplishments during his first administration.
But additional tax cuts are likely to run into hurdles amid the nation’s ballooning national deficit, which the CBO has estimated to be $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2024.
The CBO also projects that interest on the national debt alone for fiscal year 2024 will clock in at roughly $892 billion.
On Monday, the national debt exploded past $35 trillion for the first time ever.
One avenue Trump has floated to compensate for those reductions is to ramp up tariffs.
He’s dangled a 10% across-the-board tariff on foreign imports broadly and suggested 60% tariffs (or even higher) on imports from China.
