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Among the toughest long-term challenges facing President-elect Donald Trump and the incoming 115th U.S. Congress is ensuring the continued viability of the Social Security and Medicare programs, both of which, according to reports by their boards of trustees, face insolvency by the year 2034. On 8 December 2016, Republican Congressman Sam Johnson, chairman of the House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee, introduced legislation — titled The Social Security Reform Act of 2016 (H.R. 6489) — designed to permanently save Social Security: Among other measures proposed by Johnson, the plan would gradually increase the normal retirement age to 69, progressively reduce benefits for the top half (in income) of retirees, and limit cost-of-living adjustments and spousal benefits for the highest-income retirees, while increasing minimum benefits for those who earn the lowest. No matter how it's sliced and diced, Johnson's plan calls for benefit cuts — one of the biggest no-nos in American politics. All eyes are therefore on President-elect Trump, who repeatedly said during the 2016 campaign that he would not consider cutting Social Security — or did he? Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders certainly thinks Trump said he wouldn't: But Johnson's plan has caused confusion, even among some who supported him, about Trump's own position on the issue. At snopes.com we've been inundated with questions about what Trump does or doesn't plan to do about Social Security, so we gathered together some of his more recent statements to see how they added up. On the whole — at least during the campaign — Trump has consistently said he's against cutting benefits, while acknowledging that the system needs fixing: Going back further in time, we found statements contradicting his statements during the campaign, such as when, in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump compared Social Security to a Ponzi scheme. The pyramids are made of papier-mâché, he wrote, going on to suggest that the retirement age be raised to 70 and the system be at least partially privatized. But that was 16 years ago. He's said nothing of the kind more recently. According to an unnamed source quoted by Bloomberg Week in May 2016, Trump insisted during a conversation with House Speaker Paul Ryan (who has generally supported entitlements cuts and has spoken in favor of Social Security privatization), that no Republican who vowed to cut Social Security could win the presidential election: There's often a considerable disconnect between the promises candidates make on the campaign trail and the positions they take in office — especially when those promises differ from the stands taken by other powerful members of their own party — so we can't predict whether or not Donald Trump will hold the line against any and all Social Security cuts. But we can tell you with certainty that he said he would.
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