Gambling with Americans’ Futures

Vikki Marshall helped to connect unemployed Arizonans with food and shelter during the Reagan-era economic crisis and sometimes found herself on the phone late at night trying to talk a desperate person out of suicide.
These experiences as a social worker and union activist in the 1980s left her keenly aware of the tenuous lives many Americans lead and turned her into a lifelong fighter for the opportunities and resources essential to building more resilient families.
But while Marshall spent decades working alongside other union members to foster economic security, Republicans in Congress did the opposite. They repeatedly attempted to gut Social Security and gamble with Americans’ futures.
It happened again last week. Extremists in the U.S. House demanded $183 million in cuts to the Social Security Administration, along with needless cuts to other vital programs and agencies, to avert a government shutdown.
Democrats defeated the right-wingers once again, preserving the programs and keeping the government running. But Marshall, a longtime member of United Steelworkers (USW), knows the GOP will continue targeting Social Security and torpedo the program if they ever have enough votes to get away with it.
“It isn’t their money to play with,” fumed Marshall, 80, now president of Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) Chapter 39-8 in Tucson, Ariz.
“It’s our survival. It’s ours. We earned it,” she said, noting Americans support Social Security while working and, in return, receive payments during retirement or in cases of disability. “I’m very grateful. I have a pension in addition to my Social Security. A lot of my friends and neighbors do not.”
Millions of retirees rely entirely on Social Security and would fall into poverty without it. And even though Americans overwhelmingly oppose cuts to the hugely popular program, Republicans cannot keep their hands off of it.
Over the years, they tried to privatize Social Security and bet Americans’ futures in the stock market. They plotted to increase the retirement age and hollow out benefits for people already paying into the system, potentially forcing Americans to postpone retirement, scrape by during their golden years, or work until death. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, for example, was once caught on camera saying he wanted to “phase out” Social Security and “pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.”
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