Free Republic

President Trump scrapped potential reforms to Social Security and Medicare while preparing his first budget request, according to Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney, a fiscal hawk and former member of the House Freedom Caucus, said Trump quashed potential changes to Social Security, citing his campaign pledge not to touch the program. “I laid to him the options that Mick Mulvaney would put on a piece of paper,” Mulvaney told CNBC in an interview that aired Tuesday. “And [Trump] looked at one and said, ‘What is that?’ And I said, ‘Well, that's a change to part of...

A ringleader in one of the biggest Social Security disability fraud cases in U.S. history has pleaded guilty to filing more than 1,700 bogus applications, bilking the government out of potentially a half-billion dollars. But the administration is struggling to figure out how to handle the applicants, many of whom say that even though their applications were falsified, their cases are real and they shouldn’t be punished for having been ensnared by the massive fraud. Eric C. Conn, a prominent lawyer in eastern Kentucky, signed a guilty plea late last month acknowledging the scam, in which he recruited and filed...

A Missouri woman who has attended official meetings on resettling migrants is blowing the whistle on United Nations and federal schemes that she says are quietly flying in huge numbers of unvetted, diseased “refugees” from across Africa and the Middle East — many of whom do not even have a known name — and immediately handing them passports, Social Security numbers, and a vast array of tax-funded benefits. Noting that the overwhelming majority of the migrants she observed were men, she suggested the schemes were an “intentional device” to “invade the United States of America.” Adding insult to injury, said...

Authored by Jeff Reeves via The HillI’m not a fan of the “greed is good” mentality of Wall Street investment firms. But the next financial crisis that rocks America won’t be driven by bankers behaving badly. It will in fact be driven by pension funds that cannot pay out what they promised to retirees. According to one pension advocacy organization, nearly 1 million working and retired Americans are covered by pension plans at the risk of collapse.The looming pension crisis is not limited by geography or economic focus. These including former public employees, such as members of South Carolina’s...

Social Security... The SSI program. Liberals hail it as the toast of socialism. Liberals promulgate SSI as proof that government cares. The social secuirty program cares, the program is there to help those who cannot help themselves and that welfare state is superior to Christian charity. According to New York Times columnist and leftist Charles Blow, "Social security is the gift of Washington to the American people. It is what makes America a higher standard in freedom and prosperity." Just like everything printed by the Bolshevik News media including the Times and its left wing mouth pieces, nothing could be...

Changes to Social Security Gun Background Check Rule John Lott talked about the Trump administration’s decision to roll back an Obama administration rule on background checks for gun purchases. Video https://www.c-span.org/video/?424766-4/washington-journal-john-lott-discusses-background-checks-gun-purchases

Freeper umgud predicted "MSM will report that Trump is giving guns to crazy people." in http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3530085/posts Medscape is a bulletin e-mailed to thousands of health- care professionals. The article itself is reasoned and more accurate. ... "Trump signed a bill that overturned an Obama-era rule designed to stop certain individuals with mental disorders from buying guns. Issued near the end of Obama's presidency, the rule banned gun ownership by people who are on Social Security disability because they have mental health problems that prevent them from working and who must have someone manage their financial affairs." ... "but under the...

On a day when legislation benefiting women and black colleges and universities was signed with much pomp and circumstance, President Trump quietly followed through on his pledge to defend the Second Amendment by signing the repeal of Barack Obama’s Social Security gun ban. The U.S, House voted to repeal the ban on February 2 and the Senate voted to repeal it on February 15. The ban was fashioned behind closed doors in the summer of 2015 and Breitbart News reported: The specific details of the ban are unknown, as it is being put together “outside of public view.” But the...

President Donald Trump will call for a substantial increase in military spending and look to safeguard Social Security and Medicare from any cuts in his first major step toward compiling a budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, a senior administration official told CNN on Sunday. The White House on Monday will issue the outlines of a budget proposal to federal agencies, a document that has largely been drafted by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, the official said. The budget outline will also call for spending cuts to several federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency. The...

WASHINGTON – Congressional Democrats introduced a bill that would increase the investment gains tax by 6.2 percent for households with adjusted gross income of $250,000 and above to pay for an expansion of Social Security. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), sponsor of the Social Security Expansion Act in the Senate, said the proposed “net investment income tax” increase from 3.8 percent to 10 percent would make “millionaires and billionaires” pay more in taxes to expand Social Security and extend the life of the program. The investment gains tax originally became law as part of Obamacare. “Everybody in this room knows that...

Here's a tale of government waste involving all the usual suspects: incompetence, indifference, and laziness. The inspector general for the Social Security Administration discovered that a billion dollars in benefits was paid to people who had no Social Security numbers.  The benefits were paid to "representative payees" – people who were accepting benefit checks on behalf of another because the beneficiary was unable to manage his Social Security payments by himself. Seventeen percent of these representative payees were illegal aliens, according to the audit. Washington Times: Over the last decade, the agency paid $1 billion to 22,426 representative payees who "did...

The Social Security Administration paid $1 billion in benefits to individuals who did not have a Social Security Number (SSN), according to a new audit. The agency’s inspector general found errors in the government’s documentation for representative payees, otherwise known as individuals who receive retirement or disability payments on behalf of another person who is incapable of managing the benefits themselves. The audit released Friday found thousands of cases where there was no SSN on file. Over the last decade, the agency paid $1 billion to 22,426 representative payees who "did not have an SSN, and SSA had not followed...

MADISON, Wis. – The director of a scandal-plagued Social Security Administration hearing office used official leave and sick leave to gamble at an area casino, while a group supervisor got paid a full day’s wage to watch a Green Bay Packers football game. TIME FRAUD: A federal investigation into a Madison Social Security Administration office found the hearing office director used sick leave to gamble at an area casino and another supervisor watched a Green Bay Packers game on the clock, according to a letter from Sen. Ron Johnson. These are just some of the many details about troubling conduct...

To make heads or tails of the Social Security debate requires an understanding about what Social Security truly is. But that understanding is exceedingly difficult to attain, given that both sides of the debate are prone to making misleading, or altogether false, statements about the nature of the program. Take Nancy Altman, co-director of Social Security Works. She takes the then-incoming Trump administration to task for not having campaigned on the issue of Social Security reform, but because Paul Ryan said after Trump’s election that “with a unified Republican Party, we can get things done,” she immediately turned to her...

House Republicans will move this week to wipe out a series of rules finalized in the closing days of the Obama administration, including one that could prevent certain Social Security recipients from purchasing guns. Under the rule — part of President Obama’s gun control push — Social Security was to scour its lists for people receiving certain disability payments who were deemed mentally impaired, then flag their names in the national gun-purchasing background-check system. The Obama administration billed it as a way to provide more complete information about people who shouldn’t have access to firearms, but gun rights advocates saw...

WASHINGTON — Americans are getting older, but not this old: Social Security records show that 6.5 million people in the U.S. have reached the ripe old age of 112. In reality, only few could possibly be alive. As of last fall, there were only 42 people known to be that old in the entire world. But Social Security does not have death records for millions of these people, with the oldest born in 1869, according to a report by the agency’s inspector general. Only 13 of the people are still getting Social Security benefits, the report said. But for others,...

Big news from yesterday, both policy-wise and politically. Remember, Senate Dems are going to try to sink Tom Price during his confirmation hearing this month because he wants to replace Medicare with a voucher system. Medicare will be a linchpin of their 2018 midterm strategy, especially in red states where they’re in trouble: Between Price, Mick Mulvaney at OMB, and of course Paul Ryan, Trump has aligned himself with some of the most aggressive entitlement reformers in Washington. The more power you hand to Republicans, Dems will say to Trump’s blue-collar base, the more you’re gambling with your health...

Incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on Sunday suggested President-elect Donald Trump stands by his campaign vow not to cut Medicare. "I don't think President-elect Trump wants to meddle with Medicare or Social Security," Priebus said on CBS's "Face The Nation." "He made a promise in the campaign that that was something that he didn't want to do." The president-elect does plan to grow the economy and help "shore up Medicare and Social Security for future generations," Priebus said. "And if we can get 3 to 5, 6 percent growth, we'll do that," he said. "And we'll explode...

snip Economist Teresa Ghilarducci, director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, says she offered assurances at union board meetings and congressional hearings that employees would have enough to retire if they set aside just 3% of their paychecks in a 401(k). That assumed investments would rise by 7% a year. snip Ms. Ghilarducci wants to ditch the 401(k) altogether. She and Blackstone Group President Tony James are recommending a mandated, government-run savings system that would be administered by the Social Security Administration and managed by investment professionals. While both are Democrats, they believe their solution has bipartisan appeal....

Social Security benefits will be cut at the start of 2017 for everyone who has yet to turn 62. Those cuts will grow in each year to 2022, reaching 7% for everyone now 56 and under, as the official retirement age rises two months per year to 67. Those benefit cuts are part of the daunting math for Social Security and the federal budget that could cause speed bumps for, or perhaps even curb, President-elect Donald Trump's big fiscal plans. 1) Once the retirement age rises to 67, Social Security's early retirement penalty will cut annual benefits by 30%... 2)...