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Commentary: A proposed new ‘fix’ for Social Security that harms workers and protects the rich
How worried are America’s wealthy about the possibility they’ll be hit with a higher tax for Social Security?
Plenty, judging from the endless creativity of their proposals to improve the program’s fiscal condition by cutting benefits rather than raising revenue (typically from our most affluent taxpayers).
The latest run at this fence comes from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which as I’ve explained before is an offspring of the late billionaire hedge fund operator Peter G. Peterson, who was an obdurate foe of Social Security. The committee dubs its proposal the “Six Figure Limit,” which is accurate enough: It would cap annual Social Security benefits at $50,000 per person, or $100,000 per couple.
The $100,000 amount will continue to erode to the point that it is a subsistence level benefit unrelated to prior earnings, just as conservatives have been advocating since 1936.
— Nancy Altman, Social Security Works
Make no mistake: This is a benefit cut. It’s part and parcel of the enduring Republican and conservative project to protect their rich patrons from paying taxes to cover their fair share of the costs of social programs.
As recently as a White House event Wednesday, President Trump revived the old “guns or butter” debate—it was Lyndon Johnson who said during the Vietnam War that the country could afford both, but Trump stated that as long as “we’re fighting wars…it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”
Trump said those programs should be taken up by the states, which would have to raise their own taxes, allowing the federal government to “lower our taxes.”
The committee claims its proposal would affect only the richest, but that’s true only as a snapshot of current conditions. About 1.2 million of the 53.6 million retirees receiving benefits today, or about 2.3%, receive enough from Social Security to breach the $50,000 annual cap.
Typically they’re retirees who earned the maximum taxable wage income — $184,500 this year — almost every year of their work careers, and also opted to defer receiving their benefits until age 70 to receive a higher monthly stipend. Thanks mostly to inflation, however, the cap will creep into the middle class as sure as water seeks its own level; that may take years, but by the time today’s youngest workers retire, it would be entrenched in the system.
The proposal reflects one of Pete Peterson’s hobby horses, which was the idea that scads of money could be saved by means-testing Social Security so billionaires like himself don’t get handouts they don’t need.
The Six Figure Limit reads like a stepchild of that notion, but as I’ve reported before, the problem with it is that means-testing Social Security wouldn’t save the program much money unless you started cutting means-tested benefits at incomes as small as $50,000.
The CRFB’s proposal, as embodied in an explanatory manifesto posted on its website, doesn’t explain why $100,000 should be the cutoff, other than that maybe it’s a nice round number.
“This is a program that, when you go back to its founding, was a measure of protection against falling into poverty,” Marc Goldwein, the committee’s senior policy director, told CBS News. “The fact that an income support program would pay six figures is a little silly.”
I asked the committee what’s “silly” about a couple receiving $100,000 from Social Security after they’ve paid for it all their working lives, and given that U.S. median household income was $1,071 when Social Security was founded in 1935 and today it’s $83,730. I didn’t hear back.
The committee acknowledges that only “a small fraction of retirees” currently receive benefits of $50,000 or more today. But it frets that “$100,000 benefits will become increasingly common as Social Security’s benefit formula leads benefits to grow over time.” This isn’t quite true: It’s economic growth, more than the benefit formula, that does that, by advancing average wages.
Social Security advocates and experts have responded to the proposal with disdain. Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, labels it a “Trojan horse.”
That’s because of its proposed structure. The committee presents three possible models: Two would fix the cutoff at $50,000 per person for 20 or 30 years. The third would allow it to increase in accordance with the chained consumer price index, a little-used inflation metric that rises more slowly than the commonly used urban CPI.
Either way, Altman observes, “the $100,000 amount will continue to erode to the point that it is a subsistence level benefit unrelated to prior earnings, just as conservatives have been advocating since 1936.”
The CRFB manifesto is a scary document. It asserts that the cap would be a boon for economic growth by reducing federal borrowing and prompting retirees to rely more on resources such as personal savings and investment returns.
This happens, it says, according to “a large body of research” finding that “workers — especially high-income workers — increase their private retirement savings in response to reductions in expected public pension benefits.” In other words, if you’re afraid your Social Security is going to be cut, you put more in your IRA.
That makes sense, but only superficially. First, what about everyone other than “high-income workers”? Many middle- and working class households already struggle to meet common everyday expenses, let alone saving for college and retirement. Where will they find the money they’ll need once Social Security is gutted?
Second, who says workers invariably save more when they’re afraid of Social Security cuts? The committee footnotes this assertion to a Congressional Budget Office meta-analysis of 30 studies, conducted in 1998. What did the CBO learn? It was that no one knows.
Some studies, the CBO said, found that each dollar of expected Social Security reduces personal savings, but the range of reduction was “between zero and 50 cents.” In other words, the phenomenon may or may not be real. And if not, this pillar of the Six Figure Limit crumbles to dust. People will be thrown back on personal resources that don’t exist.
The CRFB manifesto contains other specious arguments. For example, it argues that America’s Social Security benefits are unduly generous in global terms. It validates this conclusion by comparing the maximum benefit in the U.S. in 2024 ($93,452 for a couple) to those of such other advanced economies as France ($69,403 in purchasing parity with the U.S.), Canada ($43,608) and the Netherlands ($41,765).
Yet the comparisons are suspect. National pension systems are highly diverse. France’s social security program, for example, is a mandatory supplement to private pensions, unlike in the U.S. In some countries, old-age benefits are part of broad social programs that include universal government-paid healthcare as well as government child care and other social services that don’t exist in the U.S. I asked the CRFB to respond to these issues, but received no reply.
It’s important to keep in mind that proposals like this have one fundamental goal: sparing the wealthy from an increase in their Social Security payroll tax, which is the only way to ensure the program’s fiscal feet stand on dry ground other than cutting benefits.
This year, the tax of 12.4% is levied on wage income up to $184,500, with half paid out of worker paychecks and half directly by employers. That means workers will pay a maximum $11,439, with employers paying the same.
On wages higher than the income tax cap, the rate drops to zero. For someone with income of, say, $500,000, the effective rate for each side falls from 6.2% to about 4.3%; for those with $1-million incomes, it falls to 2.28% on each side. Since the tax is on wage income alone, wealthier taxpayers get an additional break — half of the income or more for the richest Americans is in the form of investment income, which isn’t taxed at all for Social Security.
Making such so-called unearned income part of their tax base and eliminating the tax cap would improve Social Security’s fiscal balance far more than the Six Figure Limit, but that would significantly increase the Social Security tax liability of millionaires and near-millionaires. That may explain why their cat’s paws in Congress and at conservative think tanks expend so much energy finding alternatives to a tax hike.
It’s tempting to relegate this latest idea to the pile of transparent maneuvers to avert a higher Social Security tax, but the danger is that policymakers and pundits will parrot the argument that $100,000 is just too much for a retirement pension. The Washington Post editorial board started the process on March 24 with an unsigned editorial headlined, “Nobody needs over $100,000 per year in Social Security benefits.”
The piece balanced the putative generosity of Social Security against the federal government’s $39-trillion debt and a federal deficit “larger than during the Great Depression,” as though those are the consequences of providing for 53 million retirees, disabled persons and their dependents, rather than enormous tax cuts provided for the wealthy. The Post’s owner, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is one of the richest men on Earth.
Anyway, the Post’s screed elicited a well-deserved beat-down from Max Richtman, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, who crisply informed the board that its editorial was “based on the fallacy that Social Security is a welfare program. It is, in fact, social insurance.”
As he explained, “workers pay into the program and receive payments to replace income upon retirement, disability or the death of a family breadwinner. These are the ‘hazards and vicissitudes of life’ that President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to when signing Social Security into law.”
Richtman is right about Social Security, and the CRFB is wrong. For the beneficiaries who have been saved from poverty in their old age or after disability, the difference is more than rhetorical. It’s a fact of life.
Ford Motor Co. is suing a prominent Los Angeles lemon law firm for allegedly inflating their fees by as much as 7,000%, the company’s latest attempt to crack down on California attorneys who it says are exploiting the state’s unique law to protect consumers from defective cars.
Quill & Arrow, a personal injury firm that represents drivers suing over so-called “lemons” — vehicles with significant, unfixable manufacturing flaws — has long been a thorn in the side of Ford. Since 2021, Ford said its has paid them more than $100 million, roughly half in attorney fees.
That profit, Ford alleges in a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, came from billing records that were “utter fabrications.”
Quill & Arrow used an overseas “army” of low-paid, non-lawyers to help file thousands of lemon lawsuits and then pretended the work was done by California attorneys, who billed as much as $950 per hour, Ford alleged in its complaint.
Ford claims that the bulk of the work was actually done by non-lawyers in countries such as Mexico and the Philippines, who got paid as little as $13 per hour.
Quill & Arrow was founded in 2019 by attorneys Kevin Jacobson and Jonathan Shirian, according to the firm’s website, which touts recovering $500 million in lemon law payouts. The partners called Ford’s lawsuit “nothing more than an attempt to silence firms who would dare to hold them responsible and seek justice for consumers.”
“It grossly mischaracterizes the facts and the claim that Quill & Arrow created fabricated attorney billing records is absurd,” the firm said in a statement.
California’s lemon law, considered one of the strongest consumer protections in the nation, allows drivers to get a refund or replacement of a broken car if the manufacturer can’t fix it. If the driver is not satisfied, they can sue.
If the driver wins, the law allows attorneys to collect their fees from the car maker — rather than take a percentage of the client’s winnings, as is common in personal injury cases. This fee structure, Ford argues, has turned the law into a bonanza for plaintiff attorneys. The longer the case drags on, the company argues, the more the law firm can reap in profit.
Ford alleges the firm intentionally slowed down its clients’ cases to drive up their billable hours, instructing drivers not to communicate with Ford and pushing them toward filing a lawsuit.
“California’s Lemon Laws are in need of reform and the courts need to exercise more oversight, given the fraud we continue to expose,” said Doug Lampe, counsel at Ford, in a statement. The law is “being blatantly abused by the lemon law plaintiffs lawyers, the bar is not policing its own and the courts need to monitor fee awards with far more skepticism and scrutiny.”
The cases, he said, “have become about the lawyers for the lawyers.”
Lemon law cases have exploded in California in the last decade from about 4,500 cases in 2015 to roughly 30,000 in 2024, according to an analysis from the Assembly Judiciary. These cases, officials warned, “are poised to cripple the entirety of California’s civil justice system.”
In 2024, the legislature tightened the state’s lemon law, requiring additional steps before a driver could sue. The bill seems to have put little dent in the caseload: Lemon lawsuits surged to record levels the following year.
Ford’s lawsuit marks the second attempt by one of America’s largest car manufacturers to go on the offense against lemon law attorneys in Southern California.
Ford sued a cohort of local lemon law firms in May 2025, accusing attorneys of collecting at least $100 million in “phantom legal fees” by billing for hours they never worked. The case, which was brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, alleged lawyers worked together to file a flurry of fraudulent cases with billable hours that defied logic.
A partner at Knight Law Group, an L.A.-based lemon law firm, once billed an “ostensibly heroic but physically impossible” 57.5-hour workday, Ford alleged.
Knight Law Group denied inflating their billing, calling the suit a “thinly veiled attempt to silence firms who would dare to hold them responsible and seek justice for consumers.”
A judge threw out the suit in March on the grounds that lawyers were protected under the 1st Amendment from being sued for the content of their lawsuits unless the case was proved fraudulent. Ford says it plans to appeal.
After Quill found about the Knight Law Group case, Ford alleged, Quill dedicated a team to “scrubbing” their own timesheets of “impossible time entries.”
Ranch dressing is having a moment thanks to the World Cup and Kraft is ready to meet it.
The company said Thursday that it is working on a “TSA Compliant Ranch” for those looking to travel with the quintessentially American condiment. The announcement follows the influx of social media videos showing international soccer fans sampling the dressing for the first time.
“Some visitors leave with souvenirs. Others leave with America’s favorite dressing,” Kraft wrote in a caption accompanying an AI image of a TSA-approved clear bag packed with ranch dressing packets posted to social media. The image showed the bag — complete with a luggage tag resembling a ranch dressing bottle — placed in an airport security screening bin along with other travel essentials.
Additional details will be announced later, the company said.
TSA has also leaned into ranch’s apparent newfound popularity among international travelers, providing some helpful tips (and warnings) on social media.
“If you’re visiting for a very large sporting event & you happen to discover RANCH while you’re here… pls pack it in your CHECKED BAG on your way home,” the agency posted on Instagram Tuesday. It also asked travelers to “avoid chugging your ranch outside security” lines.
“Who knew dip-lomacy could be achieved through addressing the obvious: ranch is the king of condiments,” TSA wrote in the caption accompanying its carousel of humorous ranch-related quips. “If you’re traveling within the U.S., make sure to keep your carry-on sauces to 3.4 oz or less and place any larger containers in your checked bags.”
“Some heroes wear capes. Others bring ranch,” it added.
According to 1987 Times reports, ranch dressing was invented by Steve Henson, who opened the Hidden Valley Guest Ranch in Santa Barbara in the mid-1950s with his wife, Gayle. The unnamed condiment originally mixed herbs and spices with buttermilk and mayonnaise and its popularity with guests led to it being jarred so they could take some home. The more travel-friendly powdered form followed.
A landmarked downtown Los Angeles apartment building designed by famed Los Angeles architect John Parkinson is on the market as its owners face foreclosure.
Residences in the Metropolitan, a 10-story tower built in 1913, are nearly filled with tenants but its ground floor retail spaces on Broadway and 5th Street are unoccupied, as are other street-level stores in downtown’s Historic Core.
The historic building was once considered one of the best in the city and is owned by the Fallas family, which operated a chain of value-priced clothing stores based in Gardena including one called Fallas Paredes in the Metropolitan.
Fallas-Paredes at 449 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
(Google Maps)
Around 2011, Michael Fallas, who once worked in family’s downtown store as a stock boy, converted the upstairs floors from offices to apartments while continuing to operate Fallas Paredes. The store closed more than five years ago in the wake of a 2018 filing by its parent company for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Earlier this month in state Superior Court, a special servicer representing Fallas’ lender asked for a judicial foreclosure of the property, alleging that Fallas had stopped making payments on a $32 million loan dating to 2017. After leasing the property for years, Fallas bought the building in the 1990s.
Fallas didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The location of the Metropolitan where the buildings stands was hailed in a Times story in 1912, saying “it is regarded by many realty men as the most valuable piece of real estate in Los Angeles.”
The building today is recognized as a city historic-cultural monument because “Broadway became the commercial center of the Southland, a title it retained until well after World War II,” with its development, the city said. One of the architects who designed the Metropolitan in the Beaux-Arts style was John Parkinson, who is credited with designing such well-known local structures as City Hall, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Union Station.
Notable tenants in the Metropolitan have included the Los Angeles Public Library, Owl Drug Co., variety store J.J. Newberry and real estate company Janns Investment Co., which sold the land where UCLA is built and developed Westwood Village, among other Los Angeles neighborhoods.
In recent years, the buildings around the Metropolitan have struggled to keep retail tenants after a spurt of residential conversions of historic buildings starting in the early 2000s brought commerce to the neighborhood. Many downtown businesses have struggled since the pandemic reduced occupancy in offices downtown and reduced the flow of visitors.
“The lack of bodies on the street is generally hurting downtown, and that’s one of the reasons that has building has problems,” said downtown real estate broker Hal Bastian, who lives in the Historic Core.
There are close to 1,000 residential units in historic buildings at the intersection of Broadway and 5th Street, Bastian said, but all the ground floor stores are closed. Drug stores there suffered substantial losses from shoplifting he said, and now, “our challenge on Broadway is leasing.”
The 88 apartments in the Metropolitan are 91% rented, according to a listing for the property by the Zacuto Group, which also touts its roof deck with pool, fitness center and barbecue grills. No sale price is set.
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