https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2022/11/05/social-security-has-been-slashed-before-our-eyes-for-decades-and-voters-barely-notice/?sh=63c58e2a3ef5

Republicans Plan To Cut Social Security—Will Voters Let Them?
Teresa GhilarducciSenior Contributor
I am an economics professor focusing on retirement security and jobs.

It’s remarkable that Social Security is not the front-and-center issue in the midterm elections. Key Republicans say they will cut Social Security and Medicare if their party gains power. Some Republicans are considering raising the full retirement age to 70. These long-promised Republican policies threaten millions of older Americans, and all those who will grow old — and they will only make current economic stresses even worse.

You’d think that cutting Social Security when retirement income security is already so fragile would be a singularly unpopular position, yet it is barely discussed in congressional campaigns.

Republicans have done this before. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan and Republicans cut Social Security benefits by raising the full retirement age to age 67, which is just a way to say Congress changed the formula so benefits would be 10% to 15% smaller at every claim age. Now, Republicans want to change the formula to make 70 the so-called full retirement age, which will further cut monthly benefits.

How low is still too high for the Republicans? Social Security has be been slashed before our eyes for decades and voters have not noticed. They should.

The Social Security system was implemented nearly 87 years ago, in 1936, despite majority Republican opposition to the plan. Social Security was never designed to replace 100 percent of preretirement income, but it replaced a lot. But since Republicans began slicing it in 1982, Social Security replacement rates have fallen dramatically. Mark Miller, in his Retirement Revised blog, describes the Center for Retirement Research’s findings that average earners retiring at age 65 would have received 41 percent of their preretirement earnings from Social Security in 1995, after considering taxes and Medicare Part B premiums, but would replace only 29% of their income in 2035. The Social Security replacement rate will have fallen from 41% to 29% in 30 years. That’s a ton of lost money for seniors in need.

The escalation in trans (-gender and -vestite) news in recent years has been truly mind-boggling. A fringe (don’t believe the new numbers) segment of the American public has been dominating the leftist news organizations. While it’s true that the MSM is just making it up as they go along, I would have guessed they’d go for something more leftist mainstream, like paying for everything that illegal aliens do once they arrive here.

Instead, they have decided that the woke agenda was best forced on American society via the “T” portion of the LGBTQ alphabet soup community.

The woke trans agenda is everywhere now. We’re even seeing corporations get in on the messaging.

Here’s the thing, though: the more that the Democrats try to convince us that this is all normal and well, the more outlandish the trans crowd becomes.

Now there are trans men who are freezing tomato juice to help them mimic period symptoms. I won’t go into detail about exactly what the boys are doing with the juice, but I would refer to them as “poopsicles”. There are even online forums discussing how best for a biological male who wants to pretend that he’s a woman to fake a period.

I guess it’s a rite of passage that the trans guys go through before they can “get pregnant.”

There was also a recent story about men and menstruation, but with a slightly different angle:

In a stunning victory over the patriarchy, women now have yet another transgender icon who was born with a penis to represent them and their feminine hygiene needs. A second transgender (self-identified “girl”/adult human male Dylan Mulvaney being the first) named Jeffrey Marsh just scored an endorsement deal with Tampax.

Nothing says, “This should all be normalized,” like big bucks being paid to males to help actual women with the stigma of menses. We’re apparently living in 1870, except for the whole men pretending they can get knocked up part.

We’ve been told over and over again that we’re supposed to have more sympathy for marginalized people in our society. That’s difficult to do when said people are going out of their way to be deliberately provocative and — dare I say it — triggering. Of course, if we mention that sticking frozen tomato juice in a rectum for a bit of make believe is disturbing or that guys doing tampon commercials is nonsensical and absurd, we’re called “transphobic.”

Nah, we’re just realists who know weird when we see it.

And it’s OK that we’re not OK with it.