In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security, an insurance contract between Americans and the federal government that pays out on certain life events. As a financial safety net, social security protects Americans from what Roosevelt called the “hazards and vicissitudes of life.”
Roosevelt’s plan has been vital to the American people, and has delivered payments on time, for generations. Today, 180 million employees are paying in, and 87 million people are receiving retirement and disability benefits under the program.
Due to fluctuating demographics and other factors, payouts under Social Security now exceed pay-ins, and most analysts agree adjustments are needed to keep the program afloat. With the help of Elon Musk, Republican lawmakers, who will soon hold majorities in the House and Senate, will try to cut guaranteed benefits instead of increasing the program’s revenue.
When billionaires slash programs to fund their own tax cuts
GOP legislators are toying with reducing payouts under the system, including raising the retirement age and other benefit cuts. As one GOP representative recently told Fox Business Network, “we're going to have to have some hard decisions” on Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.
Trump’s GOP will be making “hard” choices, meaning they will be cutting benefits, in order to fund tax cuts for wealthy donors.
Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, another billionaire, to slash government programs and regulations through a not-yet-existent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk and Ramaswamy went to Capitol Hill last week to talk up their plans under DOGE, after which Republican lawmakers publicly confirmed that “everything,” including Social Security and Medicare, is now “on the table.” What’s not on the GOP’s table is fairly taxing billionaires like Musk and Ramaswamy, including requiring them to pay their fair share of social security taxes.
During America’s “golden” years, the wealthy paid their fair share in taxes
Many voters do not understand that oligarchs, CEOs, heirs, and the uber-rich pay far lower taxes today than they used to. From the 1930s until the mid- 1980s, America’s top earners paid over 60% of their income in taxes, and the percent fluctuated according to federal need. In order to finance U.S. participation in WWI, for example, Congress increased the highest tax rate to 77 percent in 1918, and yet, somehow, the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Fords still lived extraordinarily luxe lives. The highest tax fell to 25 percent from 1925 through 1931, triggering the Great Depression, then Congress raised it again in 1932, to 63 percent for top earners. In 1944, to fund WWII, the top rate peaked at 94 percent on taxable income over $200,000, the equivalent of $2.5 million in income in today’s dollars.
It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan and the 1980s that taxes on the wealthy started nosediving to today’s top effective tax rate of 27% for the nation’s top 10% of earners, thanks largely to the GOP’s need to reward its C-suite donor class. When Trump bemoans the passage of a “great” America from yesteryear, he never acknowledges that the “greatness” was built on the backs of labor and from the wallets of wealthy taxpayers.
On social security alone, if the uber-wealthy paid into social security at the same rate as the lower and middle classes, the fund would remain solvent and be able to expand benefits instead of slashing them. At present, social security taxes are capped for the wealthy, meaning, they stop paying social security taxes at a certain level which is far below their actual earnings. In 2024, the Social Security tax cap is set at $168,600, meaning income over that amount is not subject to any social security tax whatsoever.
For billionaires like Musk and Ramaswamy, only $168,000 out of their millions/ billions in annual income is subject to social security taxes, and the rest is social security tax free. Although tax-adverse conservatives would beg to differ, subjecting full, high wealth income to SS taxes would stabilize the fund.
Musk bought the presidency to write his own rules
Elon Musk, with a reported annual income of $141,475,524,215, spent over $250 million to get Trump elected through dubious means including a fraudulent “lottery” of $1 million a day. Musk pays an effective tax rate of 3.27%.
Musk also paid $44 billion to purchase Twitter, which he then used to amplify far right messaging and weaponize election disinformation. Musk now manipulates algorithms on X to boost his own opinion, and had special code written to force his posts into more people’s feeds whether they want them or not. Musk’s own AI program identified him as the chief disinformation superspreader of the 2024 campaign. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk’s false pro-Trump election claims resulted in over 1.2 billion views on X.
To Musk, spending billions to spread election disinformation and funding Trump PACs was just the cost of doing business. Over the past ten years, Musk has received at least $15.4 billion in federal government contracts. The snag is that lucrative federal contracts come with not-so-lucrative regulatory oversight, as Musk’s SpaceX, Neuralink and Tesla have discovered. When Space X discharged polluted/toxic water into nearby bodies of water in Texas, for example, Musk found out that even in MAGA-crazed Greg Abbott’s state, where they’re itching to build concentration camps for immigrants, some people still prefer clean water.
For Musk, spending $250m to choose his own low-information boss, re-write pesky regulations, and set his own tax rate was an obvious bargain.
For the rest of us, now that the oligarchy is firmly in charge, Americans should brace for program cuts and policies enriching the super-wealthy at everyone else’s expense. I’d say the silver lining is that economic disaster will make the 2026 election a cakewalk for Democrats, but that assumes an exhausted population will still be paying attention.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.
