Heads Up. Howard Lutnick Is Preparing People For Late Social Security Checks

I don’t want to be an alarmist and we don’t do conspiracy theory on this site, but even looking at this calmly and dispassionately, I don’t see why Howard Lutnick is talking about this on television unless he’s foreshadowing a coming event and trying to soften the blow. Before you watch this, bear in mind that Lutnick is worth $2 billion dollars, yes, billion with a b. And if he was only worth $2 million, he would still be far away from understanding what the average Social Security recipient lives like. But at $2 billion in assets, he’s in some other solar system from the rest of us, the rank and file.

They’re telling us the checks / payments are going to be late.

— #RaiseHail (@AndrewJBVA) March 21, 2025

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about this. First of all, I can understand this 94-year-old woman, with a billionaire son-in-law not worrying too much about her Social Security check. If she uses it at all, it’s probably part of her discretionary income and nothing she needs to keep the roof over her head or the food on her table. So yes, Lutnick is absolutely right. She would not get upset and she would figure there was a screw up and hey, if the screw up didn’t get fixed the next month or even the next 12 months later, it’s not going to affect her life most probably.

That is emphatically not the scenario with most Social Security recipients. There is an issue of elder poverty in this country. I know about this all too well. I was in the percentage of impoverished seniors, one in 10 (10.2%), or 5.9 million adults, whose sole income was Social Security (disability, in my case) and that check was below the official poverty line. And the poverty line itself is a joke. In 2022 it was $14,040. Try living on that in the real world, let alone in California where I was until late 2020.

There are many seniors who live paycheck to paycheck. When I got malpracticed and subsequently put on disability, I lost what cash and credit I had from a lifetime of working. It’s the American dream that you work hard all your life and you’ll have a golden retirement. That’s a myth for a lot of people. I worked hard all my life, as did many people I know. It does not guarantee a comfortable retirement and if something does happen, like becoming disabled, good luck. You find out the hard way how it is to be older and in an unforgiving world with no money and being too sick to work the way you used to.

I knew hunger as an adult during the time I was disabled and before I got this blog off the ground and began making money from it.  There is also a myth in this country that there are food banks and church giveaways, and that those are like grocery stores. No way. I can tell you that in Los Angeles you were doing well to get refried beans and an abundance of bread at a food bank. That will keep you alive but it certainly isn’t a healthy, balanced diet. I had a friend in Denver who was a struggling writer, and he went to food banks there, and reported the same experience as I had in Los Angeles. His benefit, however, was being born in a family that had enough prosperity to leave him money to buy a house and that’s a substantial difference in lifestyles. I was living in rented rooms at the time of this conversation.

There are a lot of old people in poverty or near poverty. And there are many seniors that aren’t *poor* per se, but they certainly don’t live in luxury. They have to budget and take advantage of every sale and discount that they can possibly find to have clothes, modest meals out, that sort of thing. And none of them can afford to have a late Social Security check, or simply stop getting benefits.

People like this think of money in very different terms. Believe me, the wealthy do not think about money like the yous and mes. F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he said the rich are different. First of all, rich people don’t know what basic costs are. They don’t know what rent is, what a pound of bacon costs, what a delivery pizza costs, none of it.

I remember leaving a job once and a wealthy friend said to me, “So, you won’t be working anymore?” I was 36 years old at the time, and certainly in no position to retire. But this gal was from a wealthy family and never *had* to work a day in her life. She played around with interior decorating, just to have an avocation, something to do. But she never had to support herself. So to her, because she could have stopped working at any time, she apparently thought that all people had that basic ability. Would that it were so.

I knew another wealthy gal who called unemployment insurance her “champagne money.” Why? Because she had a trust fund and it paid the bills and if she was between jobs (and mater and pater insisted that she actually *work*) then that was just a check that fell from the sky to be spent on champagne. For her. For the rest of us, we prayed we could scrape by with it until we got our next job. It didn’t represent beer money, let alone champagne.

I have never liked the rich as a class of people, generally. Even the nicest of them are oblivious and tone deaf when it comes to the reality of making a living. The exception to that rule is people who have made their own wealth. Those people are very smart and should be listened to. They know how to be born into one class and rise into another by dint of ability and persistence.

I’m speaking of the people to the manor born that think that life is as easy for everybody as it is for them. You can’t tell them what it is to panic over not having enough money for a necessity because they’ve never experienced that. They don’t know how your life can be ruined over a sudden expensive car repair that wipes out what you’ve been able to accumulate in the bank in one fell swoop.

So is Howard Lutnick foreshadowing a day when the Social Security checks don’t arrive? I hope he’s not. Because if he is, then the Trump administration and its trust fund baby cabinet members are going to find out that while it’s debatable whether there’s a second American Civil War in our future, they’re damn well looking at a second American Revolution. Now. In the streets. Maybe Trump is this stupid. I guess we’re going to find out.

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