GOP Plan To Slash Social Security Thwarted [View all]

[eridani]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18278/GOP_Plan_To_Slash_Social_Security_Thwarted

Protests by Social Security advocates and objections by Democratic U.S senators who support increasing its payments stopped an amendment to kick 200,000 people off retirement and disability benefits if those individuals had outstanding felony arrest warrants.

“Dropping the Social Security cuts from the Highway bill is the first encouraging sign we’ve seen from this Congress, when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, this year,” said Kim Wright, National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare spokeswoman, speaking of the proposal that surfaced Tuesday and was deleted on Wednesday. “We certainly hope they’ve finally realized using these programs as an ATM for everything else under the sun simply won’t fly with seniors who’ve paid into these programs their entire working lives.”

The punitive proposal to slash the benefits of Social Security recipients who may have an outstanding warrant or parole violation—which in many cases is due to unpaid court fees, not criminal activity, according to senior law experts like Justice In Aging—arose as part of a 1,000-page transportation bill as a way to raise $2.3 billion for highway projects.

The proposal has roots in the mid-1990s tough-on-crime heyday in Congress that led to a massive expansion of U.S. prisons and mandatory sentencing. As the Huffington Post reported today, it was “similar to a provision from the 1996 welfare reform law designed to stop benefits to ‘fleeing felons,’ a scheme that was broadened in 2005 and eventually stymied by federal courts. The program had ensnared some innocent people who happened to have the same names as felons and also stopped benefits to some people guilty of things such as writing bad checks in the distant past. In 2009, the Social Security Administration agreed to pay $500 million in back benefits to 80,000 people wrongfully cut off.”