Social Security, Early and Late

Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Brian O'Connor at NYT:

The amount of money you get from Social Security each month depends on when you start receiving benefits.

If you were born after Jan. 1, 1960, your full retirement age is 67. Wait longer, and your benefit rises by 8 percent a year until age 70.

But if you claim Social Security “early,” or before your full retirement age, your payment is reduced, often drastically. Claiming at 62 results in your payment being slashed by as much as 30 percent from the full retirement age benefit. The reduction shrinks each year until your full retirement age. Claiming early also means that any income you earn above a set limit results in part of your benefits being temporarily withheld until you reach full retirement age. While there are limited options to withdraw or pause to reset your benefits, you should consider your initial choice to be permanent.

There are understandable reasons people cannot wait. Ruth Finkelstein, executive director of the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging at Hunter College, said many people who claim benefits at 62 have been out of work or underemployed for years.

“The mass of people who ‘retire’ between 50 and 62 were pushed out of the workplace or had to leave because of someone in the family with health concerns,” Ms. Finkelstein said. “They’ve been holding on until 62.”

About 40 percent of retirees get more than half of their retirement income from Social Security, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. About 13 percent depend entirely on their benefits.

And there’s a fear factor: According to Schroders’ 2025 U.S. Retirement Survey, more than one-third of non-retired Americans say they worry that the Social Security program will run out of money. That worry is based on federal estimates that by 2033, the program trust fund can afford to pay only 77 percent of all scheduled benefits.

Celebration of Death

Previous posts have discussed war crimes.

Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay at NYT:

The Trump administration’s celebration of death brings us far from discussions of the law of armed conflict, the constitutionality of the strikes or even the Christian morality that would eventually push Augustine to formulate an early version of just-war theory. We’re in the Colosseum, one brought to us digitally so that we need not leave our homes to hear the cheers of the crowd, to watch the killing done for our entertainment and suffer the same harm that injured Alypius more than 1,600 years ago.

This wounding of the national soul is hard for me to watch. Twenty years ago, I joined the Marine Corps because I thought military service would be an honorable profession. Its honor derives from fighting prowess and adherence to a code of conduct. Military training is about character formation, with virtues taught alongside tactics. But barbaric behavior tarnishes all who wear, or once wore, the uniform, and lust for cruelty turns a noble vocation into mere thuggery. “The real evils in war,” Augustine said, “are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power.” Such lusts, he thought, drove the pagan world’s wars. We’d be fools not to suspect that such lusts drive some of us today.

In “The City of God,” Augustine distinguishes between a people bound by common loves and those ruled by a lust for domination. A president who wants to lead a nation bound by common loves might offer up something like Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which sorrows over war, indulges in no bombast, accepts that both sides in a conflict have sinned and declares that we must fight “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” For a nation devoted to the lust for domination, a president needs to foster a citizenry that thrills in displays of dominance and cruelty. Hence this administration’s braggadocio about death, its officials’ memes about suffering, their promises to inflict pain on America’s enemies followed by scant rationales for their own policies.

America Is Vulnerable

Many posts have analyzed how foreign influence and intelligence operations.

R.M. Schneiderman and Derek Owen at The Bulwark:

American security experts fear that growing networks of foreign spies, combined with new technology, represent an unprecedented threat—one the FBI, the primary agency tasked with thwarting hostile foreign intelligence services, may struggle to address.

“Look at what the Ukrainians are doing with drones and AI against Russia,” says national-security analyst Paul Joyal. “I know our adversaries are watching.”

Yet as these dangers have mounted, the White House has proposed slashing the FBI’s budget by more than $500 million and has shifted the bureau’s priorities away from combating spies and other forms of foreign influence. Under Director Kash Patel, the FBI has moved people and power out of the bureau’s headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington and into the heartland. He reassigned nearly a quarter of all agents to a job that’s never been part of the FBI’s purview, immigration enforcement, according to data obtained from the bureau by Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat. Counterintelligence specialists with deep expertise in countries like China, Russia, and Iran are now regularly working immigration cases on a rotating basis, according to former agents who recently left the bureau. The FBI has also limited investigations of crimes like violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), allowing foreign spies greater room to maneuver.

The end result of these changes, former senior FBI officials maintain, is that America is extremely vulnerable—not just to an attack, but to an unprecedented level of foreign espionage.

“It’s a disaster,” says Robert Anderson, the head of FBI counterintelligence from 2012 to 2014. “I’m rooting for everybody because we’re all Americans, [but] Patel needs to wake up.”

Unilateral Power

Many posts have discussed presidential power.

Bruce Mehlman:

They say if you want to go fast, go alone. The Trump 2.0 White House has issued more executive orders in its first year than any Administration since FDR’s, recognizing that executive orders take effect instantly while court challenges to their legality take months. Likewise the great “unlock” for Presidential power is declaring emergencies, as Congress created special authorities for moments that demand quick and decisive action, such as 9-11, COVID or the Iranian hostage crisis. Courts usually defer to the Executive Branch on what constitutes an emergency, and T2.0 declared more first-year emergencies than the seven prior Administrations combined

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Abusing the Pardon Power

 Many posts have addressed the president's pardon power.

Stephen Holmes at the Project Syndicate:

The pardon power is the only authority that the US Constitution places entirely in one person’s hands, immune from legislative override or judicial review. Alexander Hamilton, defending this arrangement in Federalist 74, understood the danger. But he wagered that shame would restrain abuse – that a president, bearing sole blame for corrupt use of the power, would hesitate where a legislature might not. “The sense of responsibility is always strongest,” Hamilton wrote, “in proportion as it is undivided.”

Hamilton was wrong. He did not anticipate a shameless president.

Hamilton’s case for the pardon was political, not moral. He barely mentioned mercy. The power’s core purpose was emergency peace-making: “in seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”

This was the rationale for Massachusetts’ offer of clemency to participants in Shays’s Rebellion, and for George Washington’s pardon of those who took part in the Whiskey Rebellion during his presidency. The pardon was an ad hoc instrument for ending conflict after rebellion was suppressed – a discretionary tool for restoring peace when peace took priority over justice.

Crucially, Hamilton insisted that clemency must remain unpredictable. “It would generally be impolitic beforehand,” he wrote, “to take any step which might hold out the prospect of impunity.” A standing promise of pardons would encourage rebellion. The power works only if potential lawbreakers cannot count on forgiveness in advance.

Trump has inverted every element of this design. He has transformed the pardon from an instrument for ending conflict into a weapon for stoking it, from an ad hoc exercise of discretion into a standing promise of impunity, from a tool of reconciliation into a system for rewarding loyalty. Hamilton envisioned a president using clemency to heal divisions after insurrection; Trump pardoned the insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, only after returning to the presidency four years later, signaling that loyalty to him guarantees impunity.

The effects are already visible in courtrooms and law offices across the US. “If I were any defendant now,” a former senior Department of Justice official told the Financial Times, and “I had the financial wherewithal or connections, my thought would be, maybe I’ll be convicted, but I very well may get a pardon as well.” Defense attorneys are reportedly advising clients that conviction need not be the end for those who meet the criteria. Hamilton’s nightmare has become litigation strategy.

 

Bogus Pardon

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. 

Other posts have addressed the president's pardon power.

This one is about both.

Michael Luciano at Mediaite:

President Donald Trump announced he is issuing a “pardon” for a former elections clerk who was convicted of state charges in Colorado last year. But there’s one teensy-weensy hangup.

Tina Peters, a Trump supporter and former clerk of Mesa County, was found guilty of tampering with voting machines after the 2020 election. At her trial last year, Peters was convicted of helping a non-public employee gain access to the county’s voting machines. Upon receiving access, the individual took county passwords and proprietary information about the machines, which were made by Dominion Voting Systems. Trump and his allies have alleged that the company helped rig the 2020 election against him.

Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison.

On Thursday night, Trump announced a “pardon” for Peters on Truth Social:

For years, Democrats ignored Violent and Vicious Crime of all shapes, sizes, colors, and types. Violent Criminals who should have been locked up were allowed to attack again. Democrats were also far too happy to let in the worst from the worst countries so they could rip off American Taxpayers. Democrats only think there is one crime – Not voting for them! Instead of protecting Americans and their Tax Dollars, Democrats chose instead to prosecute anyone they can find that wanted Safe and Secure Elections. Democrats have been relentless in their targeting of TINA PETERS, a Patriot who simply wanted to make sure that our Elections were Fair and Honest. Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the “crime” of demanding Honest Elections. Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!

The president only has the power to issue pardons and commutations for federal crimes, as Article II of the Constitution clearly states.

Inflammatory Language: Blaming the Other Side

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization.

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

Larger majorities of Americans than in the past believe that both the Democratic and Republican parties and their supporters have gone too far in using inflammatory language to criticize their opponents. Sixty-nine percent now say this about the Republican Party and Republicans, a 16-percentage-point increase from 2011, and 60% currently believe this applies to the Democratic Party and Democrats, which is nine points higher than 14 years ago.

These results are based on an Oct. 1-16 Gallup poll, which updated a question that had been previously asked in 2011 in the wake of a mass shooting that injured former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six. The latest poll was conducted shortly after Republican activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated during an appearance at a Utah college and follows two assassination attempts on Donald Trump in 2024.

Republicans and Democrats are now nearly unanimous in believing the other party has gone too far with its rhetoric and are much more likely to think this than in 2011. Ninety-four percent of Democrats, compared with 74% in 2011, now say Republicans and their supporters have gone too far, and 93% of Republicans (vs. 63% in 2011) say the same about Democrats and their supporters.