Trump Administration: Seniors won’t complain if Social Security stops their checks.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is a backwards-ass Stringer Bell.
Former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has only been on the job a month and has already abused the position to “pump” crashing Tesla stock (before an inevitable “dump”), suggested only “fraudsters”—in other words, no decent, hardworking, or struggling seniors—would complain about missing Social Security checks. He said his grandmother, and by extension, most beneficiaries, would not be bothered.
Commerce secretary: No one but ‘fraudsters’ would complain about missed Social Security check
Really? The only people suffering in that scenario are scammers, fraudsters, hucksters, flim-flam men, criminals, and thieves? Mr. Lutnick badly needs to visit America’s fastest-growing metro, The Villages in Florida, and ask the nation’s most vivacious seniors how they would feel missing a check.
This is the type of rationalization a man who intends to fuck up Social Security payments will make.
Mr. Lutnick said: “Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the processes, who knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, because whoever screams is the one stealing.... Because my mother-in-law’s not calling, come on, your mother, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds, they trust the government.”
I imagine he thinks he learned this one neat trick from Stringer Bell on HBO’s The Wire, except he got the kingpin’s lesson exactly backwards.
STRINGER BELL: “[W]e think you got a snitch up in the shop...someone who tips off the stick-up crew. And you gotta be on that, right? You gotta be on that. I’m gonna tell you what you do. What day is it today, Friday? What happens on Friday? [Payday]...Not this Friday.... You gonna call ‘em like you gonna pay ‘em and then you crack ‘em. You tell ‘em you’re not happy with what they fuckin’ pass as work down here. When you’re not happy, they ain’t gettin’ paid.... They gonna buck a little, but they not gonna walk. And in the end, you gonna get respect... [a]nd when that money run out, they’ll come up to you and roll on you and ask you for an advance and shit, when they flat-ass broke. Them the [one] that you strike off your list. But [the one] that stay eatin’... that steady rollin’, ain’t askin’ you for shit, that’s the [person] I want to hear about. Understand?”
Perhaps Mr. Lutnick’s grandmother is uniquely complacent. I assuredly would not let that shit happen to me, though.
Axios “fact-checked” the man with brimming sarcasm: “More than 70 million Americans get a Social Security benefit every month, and for many, those checks are their only income.... By the Social Security Administration’s own estimates, of all beneficiaries over age 65, some 12% of men and 15% of women get at least 90% of their monthly income from Social Security.” Nearly half of elderly beneficiaries rely on Social Security for at least half of their income, and 1 in 4 U.S. households receive income from Social Security
If Mr. Lutnick is so obscenely, comically unaware of the financial needs of the country’s seniors, which is not particularly obscure information, then maybe his best course is to tread lightly.