Your Social Security check is getting cut. A millionaire stopped paying into it in March.

Let’s talk about Social Security.

A report went around this week. If nothing changes, Social Security’s trust fund runs dry at the end of 2032, and everybody’s check gets cut about 24 percent. That’s around 500 dollars a month – gone – for the average retiree. The checks don’t stop. They just shrink. And for a lot of people in this District 5 and across the country, 500 bucks a month is the difference between making it and not.

The way people talk about it, you’d think the money just vanished. Like nobody saw it coming and nobody knows what to do. That’s not true. We know exactly why it’s happening, and we know how to fix it.

They call this an entitlement – and it is. The tax comes out of your paycheck – 6.2 percent – and your employer matches it. If you work for yourself, you pay the whole 12.4. That’s what funds the checks. Simple.

But here’s the catch. You only pay that tax on the first 184,500 dollars you make. Everything over that line is not taxed for Social Security at all.

So, you make 60 grand a year, you pay the tax on every dollar. You make 5 million, you pay on the first 184,500 and not one cent on the other 4.8 million.

There’s even a day every year when the rich hit that cap and just stop paying – and it’s early. This year, somebody making a million dollars stopped paying into Social Security on March 9th. Finished for the whole year before spring. You paid in January, you’ll still be paying in December – they were out by the first week of March.

A teacher in Memphis pays the tax on 100 percent of what she makes. A CEO pulling in 2 million pays it on less than 10 percent of his income. Same tax – same program.

So when somebody tells you Social Security is “going broke,” ask them the obvious thing – broke according to what rule? The program isn’t short on money in general. It’s short because we decided, on purpose, to stop collecting from the people who have the most of it.

Now here’s the honest part – the part I’m not going to dress up.

I’m running for the House. One member of the House doesn’t get to walk in and rewrite the Social Security tax. Something like this has to get through the House, then clear 60 votes in the Senate, then get signed. We’ve been having the same conversations about fixing Social Security for decades – yet nothing ever moves the needle.

There are really only two ways to actually close this gap. Bring in more money, or cut what people get. They keep floating the cuts because the cuts don’t cost their donors a thing. Lifting the cap does. That’s the whole fight, right there in one sentence.

And that’s the real reason nothing moves.

Ask yourself why a fix this obvious has just sat there for decades while both parties reach for cuts instead. It’s not because the math is hard. It’s because that 6 percent who clear the cap – they’re not just high earners. They’re the donor class. And a member of Congress who needs their money to win the next race is never going to be the one who votes to tax them.

That’s why I’m running on what I’m running on. Everything in the first half of my platform – term limits, banning stock trading in Congress, closing the revolving door, getting big money out of politics – all of it comes back to this exact moment. The cap is what you get when the people writing the rules answer to the people who’d pay to keep the rules broken. You can’t fix the cap until you fix the thing that’s protecting it. It’s the same fight.

So when I say the structural stuff comes first – this is what I mean. Not because your retirement check matters less than some process. Because the process is the reason why Social Security is on its last legs. Cut the wire between a congressman’s vote and his donors, and a fix this country has wanted for years suddenly becomes possible. Leave that wire connected, and we’ll be having this same conversation in 2032 – except by then the checks will already be smaller.

I know which side of this I’m on. That teacher has been paying on every dollar her whole life. The least we can do is ask the guy who’s out by March 9th to keep paying a little longer – and send people to Congress who won’t make promises that they can’t keep.

If we want money out of politics – we’ve got to start focusing on how to get money out of politics. Nothing will ever get fixed until that happens.

Sources

1. CBS News – Social Security checks could be cut by $500 a month in 2032 (24% cut at trust fund depletion)
2. CNBC – Social Security benefit cuts could average $500 a month, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget report
3. Social Security Administration – 2026 maximum taxable earnings is $184,500
4. CNBC – How the 2026 Social Security payroll tax cap works (only ~6% of workers earn above the cap)
5. Center for Economic and Policy Research – million-dollar earners stop paying into Social Security on March 9, 2026