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andrew biggs
Andrew Biggs Is An Expert—On Destroying Social Security
Biggs has spent decades trying to take away retirement benefits from Americans, by any means necessary.
Apr 04, 2024
For decades, Andrew Biggs has paid special attention to what he says are “retirement security issues,” but in reality his racket is billionaires’ security issues.
Biggs has a certain reputation. You may not be where Andrew Biggs is politically, but you can respect his consistency: He interprets anything that happens as an excuse to cut Social Security.
In a recent op-ed for The Hill, Andrew Biggs had the gall to attack the credibility of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on retirement issues. That’s rich coming from someone who has made a career of asking ordinary Americans to make do with less in retirement so that billionaires can continue paying almost nothing in taxes.
Andrew Biggs attacking Bernie Sanders on retirement issues is like a fox attacking a farmer on the subject of henhouse management.
It’s accurate to say that Andrew Biggs is an expert in one area of retirement security: destroying it. Biggs has spent decades trying to take away retirement benefits from Americans, by any means necessary. Where to begin?
Biggs played a leading role in former President George W. Bush’s ill-conceived, extremely unpopular attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005.
Biggs has frequently supported means-testing Social Security, advocated for raising the retirement age while casually suggesting (with cruel dismissiveness) that the biggest on-the-job threat for modern workers is “carpal tunnel.” He has testified in front of Congress that Social Security’s earned benefits are too high.
In 2019, Biggs said raising the retirement age would be a good way to give people “a psychic nudge to work longer.” Biggs could not be more out of touch with working people and what they need in retirement.
Andrew Biggs attacking Bernie Sanders on retirement issues is like a fox attacking a farmer on the subject of henhouse management. Spending your life trying to steal something is certainly one way to become an expert on it!
Crucially, Biggs fails to understand Social Security and what makes it such an effective program.
Andrew Biggs desperately wants to turn Social Security into a flat, poverty-level benefit. Biggs sees the popularity and durability of social insurance, and it infuriates him. Why not welfare instead? Why not transform Social Security into something easier for Biggs and his ideological allies to dismantle and drown in the bathtub?
There’s a reason former President Franklin D. Roosevelt said “no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program.”
Andrew Biggs embodies FDR’s pithy and timeless remarks on the false promises of his Republican opponents when it comes to retirement security:
Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says,
“Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them—we will do more of them, we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”
But, my friends, these evaders are banking too heavily on the shortness of our memories.
Indeed, Andrew Biggs is banking on the shortness of our collective memories when it comes to Social Security.
Biggs is obsessed with this idea that in Australia and other Anglophone countries, public retirement programs are closer to welfare instead of social insurance. But, Biggs conveniently ignores the history of American politics, where his billionaire friends and their lackeys target and destroy the programs that Biggs wants to turn Social Security into.
That’s baloney. It’s an extremely naive misrepresentation of American politics and how conservatives like Biggs have demonized and attacked welfare.
The most effective, fairest, and politically strongest way to protect and strengthen retirement benefits for everyone is by expanding Social Security and asking billionaires to pay the same rate as the rest of us into the system.
When it comes down to it, Biggs is paid by billionaires to tell lies and try to prevent billionaires from paying more in taxes. No matter the moment, he has only one idea: Working people must make do with less—and like it!
Luckily, even with Washington, D.C.’s, goldfish-length memory, Biggs’s schtick is wearing thin. When he is in a venue where he cannot lie, like a Senate hearing, he is exposed, challenged, and rejected quite quickly and even bipartisanly.
When it comes to Social Security, it is important to remember Andrew Biggs is only an expert in one way, attempting to make the weaker argument the stronger through sophistry and sheer shamelessness. Ignore this man, and everything he says.
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Dems Slam Social Security Board Nominee Over History of Supporting Benefit Cuts
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she doesn't "understand why we are being asked to confirm someone whose plan for strengthening Social Security is to gut its protection."
Jan 31, 2024
Democrats on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee raised alarm Wednesday over the nomination of American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Andrew Biggs to serve on the Social Security Advisory Board, pointing to his long record of supporting privatization efforts and benefit cuts.
President Joe Biden first nominated Biggs to the independent board in 2022 and renominated him early last year following the end of the 117th Congress. By nominating Biggs, a conservative, to the post, Biden adhered to the board's tradition of bipartisanship.
But during the finance committee's confirmation hearing for Biggs and other nominees, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said that she doesn't "understand why we are being asked to confirm someone whose plan for strengthening Social Security is to gut its protection" to a spot on the Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB), which advises lawmakers, the president, the Social Security commissioner on how to bolster the New Deal program.
"In all fairness to Mr. Biggs, his views are not extreme outliers," Warren added. "His plan is Republicans' plan. Republican policymakers have spent years trying to undermine Social Security by pushing to reduce benefits, to raise the retirement age, and to cut payroll taxes that keep the program alive."
Warren pressed Biggs on whether he supports raising taxes on the wealthy to ensure Social Security's solvency over the long term, as Democratic lawmakers have proposed. In 2023, millionaires stopped paying into Social Security just two months into the year thanks to a cap on the amount of income subject to the program's payroll tax.
Biggs said he would "prefer not to" lift the payroll tax cap.
"So you oppose it, OK," Warren responded. "Raising the payroll tax income cap so that the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share would extend Social Security's solvency by 75 years. But if you take raising revenue from the wealthiest people off the table, then that leaves one option to extend Social Security's solvency, and that is benefit cuts."
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) pointed to Biggs' tenure on a George W. Bush administration commission that suggested partially privatizing Social Security by allowing workers to move a portion of their payroll tax contributions into private accounts, a change that would have compromised the program's primary funding source.
"I'm concerned about your record on Social Security, as you know," Brown said Wednesday, adding that Biggs and his allies support letting "Wall Street gamble with people's guaranteed retirement security."
"You advocated privatizing Social Security," said Brown. "You and your allies back off that sometimes, saying you're not—but you have been."
Biggs told Brown that he does not support privatizing Social Security, breaking with his previous view. Biggs also said that his proposed frameworks for Social Security reform have not included raising the retirement age—but acknowledged he has said in the past that it's not an "unreasonable idea."
During a Senate Finance Committee subcommittee hearing in 2013, Biggs said the "idea that we can't have a higher retirement age I think it just flies in the face of the fact that people did, in fact, retire later in the past, and today's jobs are less physically demanding than they were in the past."
Wednesday's hearing came two weeks after the Republican-controlled House Budget Committee voted largely along party lines to advance legislation to create a fiscal commission for the nation's trust fund programs. Opponents of the bill say it's a ploy to fast-track cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, warned Wednesday that "if confirmed to the SSAB, Andrew Biggs would influence policymakers to push for Social Security cuts."
"This would devastate working class families, while creating another way for billionaires to avoid paying their fair share into the system," the group wrote on social media.
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Mitch McConnell’s Plan to Sabotage Social Security From Within
Andrew Biggs, the senator’s pick to serve on the Social Security Advisory Board, is an enemy of the popular program.
Jan 30, 2024
Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans have a problem. They hate Social Security, because it is popular, effective, and doesn’t make any money for their billionaire donors. But their voters love Social Security. Ninety-four percent of Republicans oppose benefit cuts.
McConnell understands the political dangers of being openly hostile to Social Security. So instead, he is plotting to sabotage it from within. The latest instrument of that sabotage is Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the billionaire-funded American Enterprise Institute. Biggs is McConnell’s pick to serve on the Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB), which “provides advice and recommendations to the President, Congress, and the Commissioner of Social Security on matters related to the Social Security and Supplemental Security Income programs and policies.”
If confirmed to the SSAB, Biggs would have increased influence with policymakers and the media. Biggs has a long history that shows how he would use that influence: To push for Social Security cuts that would devastate working and middle class Americans, while shielding billionaires from paying their fair share into the system.
Biggs seems to think everyone has a cushy, billionaire-funded desk job like his, and would be happy to work until they die.
Biggs served as an associate commissioner of Social Security under former President George W. Bush and was instrumental in Bush’s push to privatize Social Security. His goal was to hand the American people’s earned benefits over to Wall Street. Thankfully, the Bush privatization push failed due to massive grassroots opposition.
Biggs supports raising the retirement age, and has testified before Congress that people should work longer. In his words:
Go back to 1950, when we had a highly industrialized economy. You had coal miners, and farmers, and factory workers. The average age of initial Social Security claiming then was 68. Today, when your biggest on the job risk is, you know, carpal tunnel syndrome from your mouse or something like that, it’s 63... [T]he idea that we can’t have a higher retirement age, I think it just flies in the face of the fact that people did, in fact, retire later in the past, and today’s jobs are less physically demanding than they were in the past.
Nurses, firefighters, auto workers, and so many others would be surprised to hear that their jobs aren’t physically demanding! Biggs seems to think everyone has a cushy, billionaire-funded desk job like his, and would be happy to work until they die.
Biggs also wants to turn Social Security from an earned benefit into a poverty-level flat benefit. That means huge cuts for middle class workers who’ve been paying into the program their entire lives. It would destroy Social Security’s political popularity by turning it into a welfare program—a sitting duck for Republicans to make even larger cuts.
What Biggs doesn’t want is for his billionaire donors to pay their fair share into Social Security. He doesn’t want the American people to know that if billionaires pay into Social Security all year long on all of their income, not only can we protect Social Security—we can expand benefits.
Andrew Biggs is an enemy of Social Security, and we need to keep him off the SSAB. The Senate Finance Committee is holding a hearing on the nomination this week, and the Senate may hold a vote soon. Democrats have a majority in the U.S. Senate, and they must stand united to protect Social Security from Mitch McConnell’s saboteur.
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