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Unearthed video shows Sen. Mike Lee saying getting rid of Social Security is why he ran in 2010 [1]
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Date: 2022-11-03
x Hannity: Not a single Republican has ever said they want to take away your Social Security..
Mike Lee: It will be my objective to phase out Social Security. To pull it up by the roots and get rid of it. pic.twitter.com/j0EQOyKM2q — Acyn (@Acyn) November 3, 2022
“So I don’t, I don’t recall ever having advocated for dismantling those—that’s sensitive stuff,” Lee told the Utah newspaper. “And I don’t I don’t recall advocating for dismantling them. I vaguely remember a time in 2010 when we were talking about a bunch of things.”
Lee rambled on in an attempt to defend himself, but the more he talked, the more assurance he seemed to give voters that he meant those words uttered more than a decade ago.
Lee claimed he was talking about a “need to end” what he dubbed a “pattern of the federal government occupying space that it wasn’t intended to occupy and spending too much money.”
“Perhaps that was close in time and in proximity to another conversation about Social Security, but I don’t remember ever in any time since I first became a candidate for the Senate ever saying, ‘No, we just have to end Social Security and uproot all the expectations of those who’ve paid into it,’” Lee said. “Quite to the contrary. As far as I can remember, every time I’ve spoken, I’ve said, ‘We do have problems with that,’ in part because, when it was created in the 1930s, it was sold to the American people as something that would be their property, it’s theirs. They have it, it’s just held, like in trust, in an account, by the government, in their name. It would always be their money.”
Lee said a “weird issue” arose when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the 1937 Helvering v. Davis decision that Social Security “was a tax and therefore not private property.”
The decision Lee referenced maintains that Congress has the right to spend in the interest of “general welfare” without violating the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, which limits federal authority.
He claimed that his issues with the decision aside, "it’s a commitment that we’ve made to people who’ve paid into the system" and “in the case of those who were retirees” or “within a couple of decades even of retiring, you can’t pull that away.”
Lee conveniently left out of his statement any promise to uphold that commitment for those not quite as near retirement age.
He also advocated for increasing the retirement age. “You can’t create an abrupt adjustment to that without creating a lot of problems, but I’ve established a very slow transition toward increasing the retirement age and having it hover based on life expectancy at the time,” he told The Daily Herald.
Problem is, Lee has already proven to be a liar.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/3/2133293/--That-s-why-I-m-doing-this-2010-video-shows-Sen-Mike-Lee-vowing-to-get-rid-of-Social-Security
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