Julia Conley:

With her plan for Social Security expansion, Elizabeth Warren demands that the rich pay their fair share to lift 5 million out of poverty: “No one who spends 30 years working and contributing to Social Security should retire in poverty.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday unveiled her plan to expand Social Security benefits for senior citizens and future generations after retirement, a proposal she would fund with an increase in taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

The Massachusetts Democrats’s expansion of the 84-year-old program would immediately increase benefits for seniors by $200 per month, or $2,400 per year, while adding even more to benefits for retired women, lower income households, people with disabilities, and others who face disproportionately low wages throughout their working lives.

The plan would be financed by new requirements for the highest earners to contribute their “fair share” to the national Social Security fund. The fund currently contains $3 trillion but has been threatened for years with proposed cuts and privatization by Republicans and which has yielded smaller and smaller benefits for retirees in recent years.

“Because of inadequate contributions to the program by the rich, we are projected to draw down that reserve by 2035, prompting automatic 20 percent across-the-board benefit cuts if nothing is done,” Warren wrote.

Go to link