Yet another issue he is backpedaling on and seniors on fixed incomes would be hit the hardest. If his ideas are put into play, I predict this will cause the GOP to lose the House in '24.
What House Speaker Mike Johnson has said about Social Security and MedicareMike Johnson, the new speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is on record making bold and dramatic proposals to cut and reform Social Security and Medicare.
And his ideas are likely to have a key role in the coming political battle over both programs, which face major financial crises in the years ahead that may only be resolved by deep cuts to benefits or by higher taxes.
Johnson was the chair of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative House caucus, when it laid out a blueprint for reforming both programs in 2019. Since then he has publicly doubled down on the need for urgency in reforming both programs — although he has also significantly backtracked on one of his key proposals.
Johnson’s staff did not respond to messages left at all four of his offices seeking comment.
In 2019, Johnson and his committee proposed sharply scaling back the future cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits for higher-income and even middle-income people. He also proposed a total overhaul of Medicare, switching it over to private insurance companies and drastically cutting how much the federal government spends on better-off senior
s. The proposals would move both programs more toward means-tested benefits, targeting them to the people who need them most, rather than to all seniors.Johnson and his committee also proposed raising the age of eligibility for both Social Security and Medicare by several years and ensuring that age would keep rising in the future as U.S. life expectancies rise.
Since Johnson’s election as House speaker on Oct. 25, those proposals have been slammed as extremist by liberal critics and many in the media.
But Johnson says they are an attempt to balance the programs’ books without having to raise taxes. The trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds revealed in their latest annual reports that the two programs have a total funding gap of $25 trillion, almost equal to the annual U.S. gross domestic product. This is on top of the official national debt, which is also about equal to GDP.
That $25 trillion figure doesn’t include the future funding needs of Medicare’s nonhospital benefits, which will be paid out of general taxation. Nor does it include the present value of the two program’s unfunded liabilities beyond the next 75 years, which amount to trillions more even in today’s dollars..................
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/retirement/what-house-speaker-mike-johnson-has-said-about-social-security-and-medicare/ar-AA1jlnJk?rc=1&ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=d9290369436848e188cf5c6defc45b54&ei=14