GOP platform promises to preserve retiree benefits, but it’s short on details

The Republican Party says it will maintain Social Security and Medicare entitlements without cutting benefits, but that's a tall order.

At the start of this week’s Republican National Convention, the GOP adopted its new platform since 2016.

It includes a host of economic promises, including defending the right to defend crypto mining practices. The new platform also promises to preserve the benefit levels that seniors and disabled Americans receive from cash-strapped entitlement programs. Thing is, details on how exactly the GOP will get that done are slim. 

The GOP says it can protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts, which sounds pretty good to Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

“But I’m also a realist,” she said.

For years, Munnell said that those programs have been paying out more in benefits than they bring in via payroll taxes, partly due to Americans having fewer kids and living longer. 

Meaning the only way to keep entitlement programs solvent without cutting benefits? “Is to raise revenues — and that usually comes from taxation,” she explained.

And the GOP is also pledging to cut taxes on working Americans. President Joe Biden’s plan is to raise taxes on the highest earners to preserve benefits. 

“But the math, unfortunately, doesn’t work out,” said Romina Boccia, director of entitlements policy at the Cato Institute. “There isn’t enough money at the very top to close the Medicare and Social Security funding gap.”

Both programs are projected to go broke in a little over a decade, and Boccia said that neither party has a clear plan to avoid that.