A brief tour of Getty Images shows that it's really easy to get demonstrators out on the streets to protest against any proposal to "cut" Social Security. And your union dues (AFL-CIO, AFSCME, …) will pay for your signs. Example at your right.
Still, I have a selection of more realistic articles today. First up is a prediction of doom from Matthew Hennessey at the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter: Social Security’s End Is Nigh. (WSJ gifted link)
Social Security is heading for insolvency. That line has been humming in the background of our politics for so long that most of us don’t even hear it any more. If we see mention of the coming collapse in an article, our eyes glaze over. If someone mentions it on TV, we tune out.
This complacency is the natural result of humanity’s limitless capacity to ignore the future and focus on today. Mmmm, donuts. Plus, the collapse is never that imminent.
Says here the trust fund will go bust in . . . 17½ years! We’ll probably be rich by then! Let’s order sushi.With Social Security, the danger is always clear, but never present. Might as well go about your business. If things get bad enough, someone will figure something out.
What if someone doesn’t? The problem is so severe, and the political incentives so misaligned, that it’s easy to imagine everybody standing back and watching as the whole brittle business comes crashing down.
Also sounding the alarm is Veronique de Rugy at Reason: A 22 percent Social Security cut is coming in just a few years. Will the Senate act?.
Americans will soon choose a set of senators who will take office in January 2027 and serve through early 2033. In the final months of that term, Social Security's retirement trust fund is expected to run dry and trigger benefits cuts of 22 percent—not just for the wealthy, not just for new retirees, but for everyone up to and including widows living on survivors' checks.
Somehow, this has yet to sink into the national consciousness.
The precise timing is a projection. The cuts are not. They're activated automatically following the law: Once the trust fund is empty, Social Security can pay out only what it collects. And the zero hour keeps moving toward us. This year's trustees report pulled the projection forward a full year. The program has promised to pay out roughly $30 trillion more than it will take in over the next 75 years.
Yet few candidates are talking about this in any serious way. It pays to say nothing. Evidently, lots of legislators believe that the political cost of telling voters the unhappy news today exceeds the cost of letting the cuts occur tomorrow. That's how we ended up just one term from disaster.
My own state, New Hampshire, is electing a new senator this year; it appears the choice will be between my current Democrat CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, and former Republican Senator John E. Sununu.
Looking at Pappas's "Priorities" page, it's pretty clear what he won't do:
Chris will never vote to cut benefits or force seniors to work longer for less. He has fought against efforts to raise the retirement age, slash Social Security benefits, and privatize the entire system, a move that would gamble Granite Staters’ hard-earned benefits in the stock market and benefit Wall Street.
But what he will do is a lot less clear:
Chris is committed to shoring up and improving Social Security to ensure that current retirees and future generations can trust that their benefits will be there.
Uh huh. Thanks for revealing your detailed plan, Chris.
Sununu's campaign website… doesn't talk about issues at all, let alone Social Security. During his previous term (2003-2009), he supported the "Ryan-Sununu Plan" which the lefty Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (unsurprisingly) thought was dreadful. But the American Enterprise Institute liked it.
But he lost his re-election bid in 2008 to Maggie Hassan, and I think the demagoguery about his Social Security views played a role there. This time around, he seems to be cagier, saying he's open to any and all proposals for reform.
George Will is a fan of holding candidates' feet to the fire: Crucial questions to ask Senate candidates. (WaPo gifted link) GFW notes the political realities and here's his bottom line:
America’s kakistocracy has produced gerontocracy. Government’s biggest, most beloved program is wealth redistribution masquerading as retirement program. Social Security transfers wealth regressively, upward from today’s labor force to the elderly, who have had a lifetime of accumulation, and have paid off mortgages on homes that have risen in value.
Is Congress going to take back a significant portion of this entitlement? Think about prying a bone from an entitled bulldog.
For some reason, my Linux spellchecker doesn't know "kakistocracy", but I assume it will come into more common usage over the next few months and years. It's "government by the worst".
Hayek was pretty prophetic when he wrote The Road to Serfdom back in the 1940s, and titled Chapter 10 "Why the Worst Get on Top".
Also of note:
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Speaking of the worst on top… James Freeman points to another example, seemingly little noticed elsewhere: Trump and Truth Social. (WSJ gifted link)
In response to the latest news from Donald Trump’s media company, this column intended to note that the president and his family are leveraging his official position to serve their private interests in a way that is unseemly or worse. The point still holds for a number of Trump ventures, although the modest movement in the media company’s stock price suggests that for the moment there’s not much self-enrichment in this case. It seems that whatever its faults the Trump family business is more transparent and more exposed to market risk than the Biden variety.
As for the latest news on the blending of Trump public and private agendas, Dean Seal and David Uberti report for the Journal:
President Trump broke with tradition by posting near-constant policy decisions and market-moving news on his social-media platform.
Now his media company wants traders and investors to pay for instant access to his Truth Social posts, the latest example of the first family mixing its business interests and White House affairs.
Trump Media & Technology Group said Thursday it plans to launch a data feed that gives real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking accounts on its Truth Social platform.
The president’s Truth Social account has the biggest following, with 12.9 million users. His sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump also have large followings on the platform. Trump owns about 41% of the company’s shares through his revocable trust, according to FactSet.
There's more, but how can anyone defend this corrupt sleaziness?
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And here's another potential Article of Impeachment Joe Lancaster reports: Trump threatens to revoke ABC, NBC licenses for not broadcasting his speech.
On Thursday night, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address to the nation on one of his favorite topics: the 2020 election.
Over 25 minutes, Trump aired a familiar list of grievances, inveighing against the media, China, and a nebulous collection of conspirators who allegedly stole the 2020 election from him. The allegation has long been debunked, and even the newly declassified evidence Trump touted in the speech didn't make the case he claimed.
But not every channel aired the speech, and the president threatened them with reprisal as a result. This, too, is a common refrain from the president, and it's just as meritless as his complaints about the election.
Meritless, and also
This is hardly the first time major networks have declined to carry a presidential address live. They did it under Biden, too.
— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) July 17, 2026
Threatening broadcasters’ licenses because of an editorial decision is yet another direct attack on the First Amendment. If the administration tries to… https://t.co/LBX9udhm4y
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But about that speech… Jim Geraghty seems puzzled: Trump Sure Doesn’t Act Like China Created an ‘Election Security Nightmare’.
If the president believes everything he said in his speech last night, this morning we should be seeing a dramatic sea change in U.S. foreign policy toward China, becoming a stance at least as adversarial as it was toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Color me highly skeptical that will happen.
But toward the end, Trump got to the point of what he wanted Americans to believe: Our elections are fraudulent and rigged, and your casting of a ballot is a bad joke — a naïve participation in a duplicitous sham that is corrupt to the core:
Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible.
Hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption. China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections. Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.
First, “everything is rigged, your vote is meaningless” is not quite the get-out-the-vote message that the National Republican Congressional Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican Governors Association, and the Republican State Leadership Committee want to hear. This is how you end up with two Democratic senators representing Georgia.
Jim speculates that come November, the GOP will endure another big defeat, which Trump will proclaim as further evidence that the elections were "rigged".
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