The Republican Study Committee (RSC), which includes almost 80% of all House Republicans, proposed raising the retirement age in its budget plan released on Wednesday.
The RSC budget The proposal suggests increasing the age for those who are not close to retirement in order to accommodate the longer life expectancy, but it did not give detailed information.
The budget also suggests reducing and gradually eliminating extra benefits for high-income individuals.
The RSC proposes making slight adjustments to the primary insurance amount (PIA) benefit formula without giving specifics, and these changes would not affect seniors close to retirement or the wealthiest earners.
The RSC repeatedly expressed concern in the budget proposal about the Social Security fund potentially becoming insolvent. insolvent and called for a bipartisan approach to solving the issue.
The RSC proposal stated, “With insolvency approaching in the 10-year budget window, Congress has a moral and practical obligation to address the problems with Social Security. These common-sense, incremental reforms will simply buy Congress time to come together and negotiate policies that can secure Social Security solvency for decades to come.”
The budget proposal, however, devotes significant space to criticizing President Biden and his proposed tax policies, including rate increases for the wealthiest Americans.
By releasing the budget report, the RSC is setting up a potential conflict with the White House, as President Biden has repeatedly claimed that Republicans want to reduce Social Security benefits.
During his State of the Union address on March 7, Biden said, “If anyone here tries to cut Social Security or Medicare or raise the retirement age, I will stop them.”
“I will protect and strengthen Social Security and make the wealthy pay their fair share,” he said.
The issue has become a sticking point ahead of the 2024 presidential election. The Biden campaign seized on a recent interview on CNBC with former President Trump, where he floated possible cuts.
“There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements,” Trump said in the interview. “There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement.”
Biden responded on social media, writing, “Not on my watch.”
Trump soon walked back his remarks, saying in a subsequent interview with Breitbart, “I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare … We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.”
“There’s so many things we can do,” Trump said on Breitbart. “There’s so much cutting and so much waste in so many other areas, but I’ll never do anything to hurt Social Security.”
