McCain Collects Social Security

James Joyner · · 22 comments

AP’s David Lieb has unearthed a major scandal: John McCain, who paid into the Social Security system for decades, is collecting benefits even though he thinks it’s a bad system.

Although Republican presidential candidate John McCain has called Social Security “a disgrace,” he still cashes his own retirement check every month. “I’m receiving the benefits, the system is broken and, unfortunately, my children and grandchildren, according to the trustees of the Social Security system, will not have the same benefits the present retirees have,” McCain told reporters Thursday on his campaign bus. McCain’s 2007 tax return shows Social Security benefits of $23,157 for the year, an average of $1,929.75 a month. He said he started receiving the payments “whenever I was eligible.”

This bit is amusing, too:

People are not required to take Social Security payments, according to B.J. Jarrett, a spokesman with the Social Security Administration. “An individual does have the right to refuse his/her Social Security retirement benefit. However, Social Security is an entitlement program and an individual would essentially be forfeiting a benefit based upon contributions during his/her working lifetime,” Jarrett said.

I bet further digging would reveal that, although McCain opposes earmarks in principle, he nonetheless takes them for Arizona. Further, while he decries the influence of money in politics, he nonetheless accepts campaign contributions. AllahPundit is similarly unimpressed with the scandal, musing, “I wonder how many left-wing papers ran this story today alongside paid ads placed by the sort of multinational corporations they claim to loathe.”

What’s more, so far as I’m aware, McCain doesn’t oppose Social Security at all. He merely thinks the current funding system is broken. Which, by the way, pretty much everyone else does, too. Worse yet, he wants to, um, fix it.

Indeed, this story is so obviously stupid that the only rationale I can think for it going out on the AP wire is as a backdoor way of mentioning, once again, that John McCain is old.