Donald Trump promised to leave Social Security alone, but his point man wants privatization
So much for Donald Trump's campaign promises. He pledged throughout the campaign that he didn't want to touch Social Security and Medicare. As we've already seen on Medicare, that pledge is out the window. Now it's Social Security, too. On Monday, the transition team announced that Tom Leppert, former mayor of Dallas, will be on the "landing team" for the Social Security Administration. Landing teams are charged with interacting with the federal agencies to set up Trump's new government. And Leppert, well, he's a privatizer.
Leppert, who released the plan during a failed bid for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Texas in 2012, most recently served as the CEO of Kaplan, Inc. Leppert supported Trump during the Republican primary and the president-elect thanked him at the time in a tweet. [...]
"We're gonna save your Social Security without making any cuts. Mark my words," Trump said in February.
But archived versions of Leppert's plans from his 2012 Senate run show how diametrically different his views are from Trump's on the issue.
"I will never shy away from any issue, even the so-called 'third rail' of entitlement reform," Lippert writes in his 2012 plan. "Talk to any young person today, and they will tell you Social Security and Medicare won't be there for their generation. To preserve these vital programs, we first and foremost must not change anything for those ages 55 and older. These folks rely on their benefits and we've made a promise to them. But for younger workers, we need to provide Medicare subsidies for the purchase of certified private plans, raise the retirement age, encourage greater retirement savings, and launch an initiative of Personal Retirement Accounts to allow every American, not just the wealthy, to save and invest toward their retirement. Make no mistake—if we don't act now, these programs will go bankrupt. The simple fact in this debate is that people who oppose reform are the ones who want to destroy our entitlement system."
Trump doesn’t really want to get involved with the whole policy thing. He probably doesn’t know and doesn’t care that the guy who is going to be leading the charge for him on Social Security is going to push a policy that is diametrically opposed to his own promises. He’s just letting his far-right crew take whatever the think tanks and Paul Ryan and Koch brother want and run with it.
It’s hard to know if that will last, if sometime down the line he sees his teams and the Republican Congress going off on their own, in opposition to some of the core campaign pledges he made. Or he might be so busy cashing in on the opportunity while he can that he just lets that “governing” part happen without him.