Republican Justifies Attacks On Social Security Saying People Want To Work Longer - Ring of Fire

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Republican Representative Rick Allen from Georgia made headlines this week when he defended his party's attacks on Social Security by saying that people actually want to work longer in their lives. This is coming from a man who represents a district that is plagued by poverty and other economic problems, showing how out of touch he is with the very people that keep sending him to Washington. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Republican representative Rick Allen has made headlines this week for claiming that people in this country really just wanna work longer. And that is why he says he's totally cool with raising the retirement age for social security. You know, nobody wants to retire at 65 or 67, no. They wanna keep working. They want to go out there and spend their golden years slaving away for crap wages for a massive corporation that doesn't care if they live or die. That's really what people want. Rick Allen is trying to tell us now, Republicans have made it very clear they are not gonna touch Social Security. They have also made it clear that they are definitely going to touch Social Security and screw it over. Yes, they have said both things. In fact, Rick Allen, after he said he wants to uh uh, change the retirement age, raise the retirement age, he then said like, but we're, we're not gonna touch Social Security.

But you are like, you literally have a plan to do it. So stop acting like, oh no, everybody else is getting it wrong. Republicans aren't gonna do this. Yes you are. You want to do it. Social Security has been on the Republican party's chopping block for decades. Do you not recall the big bruh? Haha. During the Bush administration where Republicans wanted to privatize Social Security and had they done that and then we had the market crash, that of course kind of came with the last year of Bush. Social Security would've gone bankrupt. It would have, they've done analyses on that. Republicans would've effectively killed it. Had they gone through with their privatization plans and now they're saying, let's just make people work more. Hell, you've already been working by the time you're 65. What, close to 50 years, assuming you've got a job at 15. So you've already been working for 50 years. So what's another five? Right? Let's just add a couple more on there.

The only threats that social security faces are coming from Republicans, it is not insolvent. It is not going bankrupt. It is Republicans trying to dismantle that program. So let's talk a little bit more about Rick Allen though, right? Because I wanted to know, I wanted to know what was happening in his district back home. So I looked it up. I did a little extra research for this one. Rick Allen, Republican from the state of Georgia represents Georgia's 12th congressional district. You wanna know how bad things are In Georgia's 12th congressional district, they have a poverty rate of just under 20%. 20%. That's their poverty rate. So yeah, doing a little worse than the rest of the country there in your own district, Rick, the median household income for the 12th district

Is $49,000. The median household income throughout the entire United States is $70,000. So the people in your district, Rick, the ones you wanna send to work for an extra five to 10 years, so they can't retire, they're making an average of $21,000 less per year than the rest of the country. That's your district buddy. That is the district that you have represented since 2014. So you have been in Congress now for eight solid years and you haven't done a thing for any of these people, nor do you have any plan to. You want to cut social security, you wanna screw over people that have already been screwed over ever since you came to office. I hope your constituents pay attention to that, and I hope they see how you're trying to make their lives worse when most of them probably already think it can't get any worse than what it already is.