Trump recently appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box to speak about economic issues and, during the interview, commented that cutting fraud from Social Security and Medicare could save a good bit of money and help limit the costs of the programs. Predictably, the leftist media pounced, accusing Trump of the usual litany of horrors used whenever reigning in the cost of entitlement programs is brought up. Among those doing the freaking out was “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg.
As background, Trump, during his CNBC appearance, said that something needs to be done to limit the cost of entitlement in prudent ways. That came after anchor Joe Kernan said that “something has to be done” about the increasingly massive cost of entitlement programs and asked if Trump had changed his mind and was willing to cut “Social Security, Medicare, [and] Medicaid.”
He said, “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of, also, the theft and the bad management of entitlements — tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement.”
The Trump campaign later insisted that he had been referring to slashing waste from the programs by rooting out theft and bad management of the programs, not necessarily by slashing the programs themselves. His campaign said, “If you losers didn’t cut his answer short, you would know President Trump was talking about cutting waste.”
Similarly, speaking to CNN, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said, “President Trump delivered on his promise to protect Social Security and Medicare in his first term, and President Trump will continue to strongly protect Social Security and Medicare in his second term. The only candidate who poses a threat to Social Security and Medicare is Joe Biden.” She added, “By unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history and put Social Security and Medicare on a stronger footing for generations to come.”
Predictably, Trump’s comment was used against him by many in the left-leaning media in an attempt to discredit him. Whoopi Goldberg, for instance, snapped, in reference to his point about fraud, “Yeah, we could put you in jail for all your entitlements.” She then snapped, to applause from the studio, “Social Security is not an entitlement. We paid for that!”
Watch Trump’s comments here:
The Social Security reference, for context, refers to Social Security as an entitlement program, saying, “The Social Security benefit programs are “entitlement” programs. This means that workers, employers and the self-employed pay for the benefits with their Social Security taxes. The taxes that are collected are put into special trust funds. You qualify for these benefits based on your work history (or your spouse or parent). The amount of the benefit is based on these earnings.“
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