Howard Lutnick, late of Cantor Fitzgerald, who is not, by any stretch, a poor man, has sorted out who the real fraudsters and abusers of Social Security might be--the people who would complain if they failed to receive a check. If they failed to receive their check, that they were counting on, because they paid into the system during their entire working life? I mean, say what, now?
“What we have to do is stop sending money to someone who’s not hurt, who’s on disability for 50 years,” he claimed. “It’s ridiculous, and they have another job.”
At one point in the wide-ranging, nearly two-hour conversation, Lutnick also said that if Social Security “didn’t send out their checks this month,” his “mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain.”
“She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” the billionaire businessman said.
You know who else might complain--not the mother of a wife of some billionaire, who is probably not hurting, but someone who depends on that money for a little thing we call food and another we call electricity. And if something "got messed up"--I do not know many people who would be happy to wait and see if it got sorted the next time around--they would want to ensure their payment got fixed!
This man is utterly divorced from hand to mouth reality. There are people on the tightest budget imaginable. They can't miss a check. They just can't. And for another wild rhetorical ride--the person on disability for 50 years? It's called "permanent and total disability" for a reason, and the qualifications to even get that are pretty goddamn stringent, and no, that is for shit that doesn't get better, kidney failure and traumatic brain injury and a parade of horribles that have to be documented by physicians.
This man is either lying or delusional.
But he is in typical TrumpWorld company; after all, Elon Musk, who could quit all his bullshit and actually pay for the welfare of his Priam-like clutch of progeny, and fund his multiple generations for a shocking duration, has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme"--which feels like he is using words when he doesn't know exactly what they mean.(Social Security is not a Ponzi. He never has bothered to know the least thing about any part of the governmental apparatus he is helping bring a sledgehammer to.)
Anyway, the Social Security thing once was called the third rail of politics for a damn good reason--people understood what it USED TO BE LIKE BEFORE. See, I would seriously rather my generation X brethren and sistern (is that a thing?) not be so dumb as to think because we can't remember when oldies used to rot in their later years and we seemed to be in the state of the government playing "keep away" with our probable retirement, that we would just fucking let our parents rot. Because the alternative is some of us are taking parents in, and also having to watch out for our kids who are not facing the greatest prospects--remember what that was like in the late 1980;s early 90's? McJobs and whatnot?
Trump ideologues are ready to "turn it off." They might feel a little rueful at getting found out saying it. But believe you me, they mean it, because they don't really believe there are people who need it.
There are people who do. There are people for whom SNAP and Medicare and a lot of things these people think are waste that are lifelines for people--and saying they don't really need them, is basically saying we don't really need those people on them and they are a waste. And no, in my heart of hearts, no, that is not a thing. You don't just decide some people have got to eat shit and die. Because that is what they are saying and I am not going to gussy that up for them.
It's a horrendous moral failure, and they could get themselves right politically if they can't fucking figure out how to do it morally. But I'd rather they don't and PAY FOR IT. Because that's what you do when you have a debt to society--you pay. And I see a lot of unearned privilege fucking going on up in here.
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