Last week, in an all-caps post on conservative social media platform Truth Social, former President Donald Trump proclaimed that retirees should not pay tax on Social Security.
“SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY!” was what the 45th President and current Republican presidential nominee posted without further explanation.
He doubled down on his stance in an interview with Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning, calling for changing the federal rules on Social Security taxation for retirees. “We can do a lot of things to help the people,” Trump said. “People on Social Security are being killed, and one of the things I’m doing is no tax for seniors on Social Security, and I’ll get it done quickly.”
While Trump didn’t mention how he would change Social Security taxes, he proceeded to again put blame on undocumented immigrants for Social Security’s insolvency. “They are going to destroy Social Security because millions of people are coming into our country, and they’re putting them on Social Security,” Trump stated in the interview. “They’re putting them on Medicare.”
Currently, undocumented workers are ineligible for Social Security retirement benefits, and will instead use a taxpayer identification number (ITIN) instead of a Social Security number to pay payroll taxes.
Those who use a fake Social Security number to pay taxes could receive benefits, but past findings from the Social Security Administration (SSA) show that undocumented workers have paid more money into the SSA than received. A 2013 report from the SSA found that while $1 billion in benefits were paid out to undocumented immigrants in 2010, these workers had contributed $13 billion in payroll taxes during the same period.
Since calling for the elimination on Social Security tax, Trump has been met with criticism and pushback from economists who believe the change could negatively impact retirees in the long-term.
“The idea may make a great political rallying cry, but it actually does not make good policy,” wrote Forbes contributor Andrew Leahey, a tax and technology attorney, professor and podcaster, in a July 31 response to Trump’s Truth Social post. “The idea undermines the financial integrity of both Social Security and Medicare and will, in fact, disproportionately benefit higher-income individuals, directly contravening the program’s current progressively.”
Vance voices against cuts
While Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance had formerly implied supporting Social Security cuts in a 2010 blog post that accused the program of driving federal budget deficits, the Ohio governor has since changed his stance.
In a 2022 interview with the Huffington Post, Vance stated he does not support cuts to the program. “I don’t support cuts to Social Security or Medicare and think privatizing social security is a bad idea,” he told HuffPost at the time.
Vance again indicated his opposition to cuts in a May interview with The New York Times, prior to being selected as Trump’s vice president. He noted that much of the responsibility for funding the program falls on workers between the ages of 18 to 65.
“If the argument here is we have to cut Social Security, then what you’re effectively saying is we just have to privatize what is currently a public problem of who pays for the older generation,” he stated in the interview. “And I don’t know why people think that you solve many problems by taking a bunch of elderly people and saying, ‘You’re on your own.'”
Vance did not support raising taxes for middle-class workers or wealthy Americans, adding that it would only fix insolvency in the short-term. “Raising middle-class taxes — I don’t like that idea for obvious reasons,” he said to The New York Times. “You can get some revenue out of raising taxes on wealthy Americans, but there’s no way that you can run an economy at a structural growth rate of around 1 percent with demographics that are getting worse and worse and worse and solve the problem by taxing rich people. You have to fix the underlying issue.”
Instead, he advocated for increasing the number of workers to continue financing Social Security, noting in past interviews that the government had previously allocated much of its spending to welfare programs rather than to Social Security funding.
“Take those seven million prime-age men not in the labor force… You shift millions of those men from not working to working; you increase wages across the board; you increase tariffs; and I think that you buy yourself a whole hell of a lot more than the nine or 10 years that the actuaries say that we have,” Vance stated. “You get more revenue, yes, from tariffs, but from more people being in the labor force, from higher productivity growth, from higher wages, from transitioning young people who are not working into the work force.”
Amanda Umpierrez is the Managing Editor of 401(k) Specialist magazine. She is a financial services reporter with over six years of experience and a passion for telling stories and reporting news. Amanda received her degree in journalism and government and politics at St. John’s University. She is originally from Queens, New York, but now resides in Denver, Colorado with her partner. In her free time, Amanda enjoys running, cooking, and watching the latest drama show.
