I know the real story about people who would complain if they missed their Social Security check.
I was adopted in the nation’s capital as an infant by an older couple who were well into their 50s when I was entering my teenage years in the mid-1960s. And while I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, my parents were living paycheck to paycheck, despite my father having two jobs. So when my father died of lung cancer when he was 65 and I was 12, my surviving mother and I were immediately left with no money except what we were going to receive from my dad’s Social Security survivors’ benefits.
That meant that after rent and utility payments, we had enough money each month for about two weeks or so of food. The other two weeks each month, we lived off of whatever I could scrape together from odd jobs I did after school. On a good day, I could scrape together just enough money to buy that night’s meal and the pack of cigarettes she could not do without.
I’ve never forgotten the days I spent worrying about earning enough money to pay for our next meal while it seemed everyone else my age was preoccupied with being a teenager. I looked forward to the first of the month when I could come home from school and not have to hustle on the street for change. And if that check did not arrive on time, it would be game over, We could not pay rent or buy groceries, and certainly not the bargain-basement clothes I wore to school. In short order, we would be homeless.
I felt alone in my life below the poverty line, but it turns out I wasn’t then—and wouldn’t be now. Today, 37 percent of Social Security recipients would fall below the poverty line if they missed a single check, according to a Center for Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of Census data. Even with Social Security, nearly one in 10 Americans over 65 remain below the poverty line.
So when President Trump’s sociopathic and witless Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said this week that only “fraudsters” would complain about a missing Social Security check, as a Social Security recipient once again, I took that deeply personally.
In case you missed it, Lutnick said on a right-wing podcast these words: “Let's say social security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.”
He didn’t stop there. He said people like Elon Musk, the manic, chainsaw-and-Nazi-salute-waving Trump co-president put in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—and the guy who is running Tesla and the social media site formerly known as Twitter into the ground—know that the “easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. … Whoever screams is the one stealing.”
No. Just no. Lutnick’s mother-in-law has a daughter, Allison Lambert, who is a partner in one of the nation’s largest law firms and is married to a man with a net worth of $1.5 billion, which enables him to brag on a podcast that no one in his immediate family would miss the pain of a late Social Security check—and label those that would “fraudsters.”
The real fraudster is Lutnick, who is perpetuating the lie, along with Musk and others who Donald Trump is enabling, that Social Security is “a Ponzi scheme” rather than a sterling example if how a nation should care for its elders. These billion-dollar fraudsters aren’t looking to make Social Security more efficient or less wasteful; they see the $1.6 trillion worth of checks going out to Social Security recipients each year, and the trust fund built from our payroll taxes that make those payments possible, as a new cash cow they can milk for their ends. Don’t believe me; ask the private equity people Elon Musk recently invited to Social Security’s headquarters to root through its payment systems.
As of this writing, Lutnick has not felt compelled by the backlash to his statement to apologize, and his boss Trump does not appear to have called him on the carpet. Personally, I am so disgusted by Lutnick’s utter contempt for Social Security recipients like my adoptive mother and me, and millions of other recipients who barely make ends meet, if at all, when that monthly lifeline comes along, that I would slap him—and gladly serve jail time.
But, then again, given the tsunami of slime that drenches the Trump administration from the very top, using my one slap on a haughty but otherwise small-time cabinet official is at the end of the day a waste. There are better ways to block an oligarchic dictatorship—and the time is now to use them.
CORRECTION: This post was updated to correct the amount of payments made by Social Security. It is $1.6 trillion per year as of 2023, not per month.
