This next Wednesday, Feb 11, the Senate budget committee will begin hearings on Social Security benefits. These are earned benefits, not welfare. The Republicans now control both houses of Congress and on the first day of the 114th Congress the House changed the rules regarding how Social Security Disability (SSDI) is funded. Both SS and SSDI are funded from the same source but go into a single account and periodically funds are transferred between accounts, but now Congress has forbidden itself from doing this. The Republicans who chair the Senate budget committee are going to discuss, yet again, privatizing Social Security and handing off the enormous $2.8 trillion trust fund to Wall Street bankers after they loosened regulations on those same banks so that they are back to the same tricks they were up to prior to the crash of 2008. At a time when so many pensions are going bankrupt, SS is the last defined benefit plan left to American workers and now they want to destroy that too. Republicans have hated SS since its’ inception and 80 years later still want to kill it. They will try to fool you into believing SS is going broke, but that lie has been debunked over and over yet they persist with the lie to get their way. GW Bush started wars to gain enough political capital to privatize SS and I remember when he tried it in his second term and it went down in flames, so now they are going to do it a piece at a time like with the ACA or anything else that benefits the average citizen out here. Call or e-mail your Senators and Congressman and tell them no cuts ever. Expand not cut SS.