Faced With Potential Changes, Dallasites Rally To Save Social Security

Kenneth Williams, 69, has been retired for eight years now, and he calls it the best time of his life. That’s why he and several others gathered outside a Social Security office in Dallas on Saturday. They say Social Security is under threat, and they won’t be quiet about it.

“Save Social Security! Save Social Security!” about 10 people chanted.

“What we’re doing out here today is to try to call attention to the whole public about the value of Social Security and the threat to Social Security that we see coming from the current [Republican] campaign,” Williams said. He’s the president of the Dallas chapter of the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans.

A group of 176 House Republicans make up the House Republican Study Committee. The committee has proposed multiple changes to Social Security in the fiscal year 2024 budget. The proposal calls for the retirement age to be raised from 67 to 69 to receive full retirement benefits, according to the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization. This could slash benefits of future beneficiaries by about 13%. According to the organization, this could amount to $718 billion in cuts to Social Security over 10 years.

Williams said his parents were too young to participate politically and advocate for Social Security when it was approved in the ’30s, but others did, and that’s what Williams plans to do. “Somebody voted, and because they voted, I have Social Security now,” he said. “I think we have to pay it forward.”

“You need to vote for as many Democrats as possible to protect Social Security, because the people on the other side, they’re coming.” – Kenneth Williams, retiree

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His solution to saving Social Security? Vote Democrat. “From Joe Biden down to the dog catcher and everybody in between,” Williams said. “You need to vote for as many Democrats as possible to protect Social Security, because the people on the other side, they’re coming.”

Gene Lantz, state president of the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans, said reducing retirement benefits and increasing the retirement age is unacceptable to the American people. “We don’t want to retire later,” Lantz said. “We want to retire earlier like they do in every other industrialized country.”

According to Newsweek, workers in the U.S. retire later than those in most European countries, and considerably later than people in India and Indonesia, which have some of the youngest retirement ages in the world.

To Lantz, Republicans’ motivation behind their Social Security proposals is simple. They want more tax cuts for the rich. “That’s all they want our money for, to make things worse for the elderly and better for the very, very wealthy,” he said.

Instead, the wealthy should have to pay their fair share, Lantz said. Today, Social Security taxes apply only to the first $168,600 of earnings, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Lantz says that the income cap should be scrapped. “Get rid of that whole $168,000 business and say, rich or poor, you have to pay the payroll tax all year long,” he said. “Rich people need to pay Social Security all year, and then there’ll be plenty of money.”

Instead of raising the retirement age and lowering benefits, Lantz said he'd rather see the retirement age lowered and benefits increased.

“We are trying to save Social Security, not just for the old people, but for the younger people, too,” he said. “In fact, the slogan of the Alliance for Retired Americans is ‘Don’t let us be the last generation to retire.’”