J.D. Vance Vice President: What He’s Said About Social Security

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance has been catapulted onto the 2024 presidential campaign after the Republican nominee for the presidency Donald Trump selected him to be his running mate ahead of the vote in November.

As Vance, a Republican, takes up the role, voters would be keen to hear his views on such matters of national significance like Social Security. Experts have suggested that the trust fund that helps pay benefits to retirees could be depleted in about a decade.

Newsweek contacted Vance’s senate office for comment via email on Monday.

Last month, the Senator had suggested that Social Security was facing a demographic challenge in the U.S.

“One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t. So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people. And typically in our society, that’s people between the ages of 18 and 65,” Vance told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

In the interview, Vance seemed to indicate he was against cuts to social security.

“If the argument here is we have to cut Social Security, then what you’re effectively saying is we just have to privatize what is currently a public problem of who pays for the older generation,” he was quotes as saying. “And I don’t know why people think that you solve many problems by taking a bunch of elderly people and saying, ‘You’re on your own.'”

Vance indicated that America needs more people working to finance the longevity of social security.

“You get more revenue, yes, from tariffs, but from more people being in the labor force, from higher productivity growth, from higher wages, from transitioning young people who are not working into the work force,” he pointed out.

Asked if raising taxes to support social security, Vance said he was not against the idea but questioned whether that would solve the challenge long-term.

“Raising middle-class taxes — I don’t like that idea for obvious reasons,” he said. “You can get some revenue out of raising taxes on wealthy Americans, but there’s no way that you can run an economy at a structural growth rate of around 1 percent with demographics that are getting worse and worse and worse and solve the problem by taxing rich people. You have to fix the underlying issue.”

Two years ago, the HuffPost suggested that Vance may have in the past supported social security cuts citing an old blog post where he noted that entitlement programs were widening the federal budget deficits.

Vance, though, said that was not his view.

“I don’t support cuts to social security or Medicare and think privatizing social security is a bad idea,” HuffPost quoted him saying to the publication.

While running for Senate two years ago, Vance suggested the problems with the trust fund may be overstated.

“People overstate the problem with the Social Security trust fund in particular,” Vance was quoted as saying by Bloomberg. “I think so long as we don’t do really ridiculous things on spending, Social Security should be stable. It should be something we’re able to take care of in the long term.”

During that campaign, Vance also said that Americans needed more workers to help finance social security.

“We’ve got to, frankly, stop spending so much on welfare benefits and start having a lot more workers who are paying into the system,” he was quoted as saying by AARP.