Call to action: America’s seniors should sue the federal government for raiding the Social Security trust fund

President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, 1935
(Source:Wikimedia Commons--public domain)

Given the increasing frequency of bipartisan attacks on Social Security and Medicare and threats to gut these programs to balance the federal budget, it’s time for seniors to get organized and fight back. The fact of the matter is that today’s seniors have ample grounds to sue the federal government for violating the law by raiding the Social Security trust fund created in 1983.

Social Security’s critics seldom mention that the program is self-funded through mandatory payroll taxes and that President Reagan, under the recommendation of Alan Greenspan, signed into law amendments authorizing the creation of a Social Security trust fund to be kept separate from the federal budget and protected in a “lockbox.”

As the NewsHour’s Paul Solman pointed out last November, “the lockbox has indeed been raided, in the sense that the money in the trust fund was never really set aside or meaningfully protected.”

Last Friday night on the NewsHour, Mark Shields finally responded to yet another slur against America’s seniors by David Brooks by saying, “Social Security is self-funding, it’s solvent, and in fact, it’s been bankrolling the rest of the government.”

In addition to suing the government for violating the law and raiding Social Security funds, it’s high time our seniors demanded from politicians and media reps like Brooks the respect they deserve by protesting the use of the derogatory expression “entitlement programs,” to describe Social Security and Medicare.