Billionaire mocks NJ seniors who rely on Social Security checks

My mom is 86 now. She began working when she was 13. It wasn’t an occasional after-school babysitting gig. It was a more than full-time job, working 55 hours a week in a hot laundry running a press. She was forced by her own mother to quit school at 13 and go earn money for the family of 10. My mother and her eight siblings were abandoned by their father when mom was 3.

She worked every year of her life from 13 until 81. She never got ahead with an education because of the hand she was dealt.

Could she have made different choices in life, gone back to night school while working, not gotten married to my dad at 20 and had children? Sure. But life often doesn’t go that way and the point should be, my mother worked hard at every job she did from the laundry to running machines at Quinn and Boden in Rahway to warehouse work and machine shops and eventually a front-desk receptionist. She worked for hard for 68 years. The only thing that stopped her was the pandemic.

She receives a monthly Social Security check and it’s her only income. If she did not receive that check one month, she would feel it. A second month would be disastrous.

Can you truly be this stupid?

Then there’s Howard Lutnick. After going to college, he was taken in by B. Gerald Cantor himself as Cantor’s protégé and was in on the ground floor of what became the famous Cantor Fitzgerald firm. He’s a wealthy financier who is a billionaire. He is now, under Trump, commerce secretary.

As commerce secretary, he recently appeared on the “All-in” podcast where he said some appalling things. He said is a senior who doesn’t receive their Social Security check and calls the Social Security office is probably committing fraud.

"Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month,” the billionaire said. “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.”

“Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, because whoever screams is the one stealing,” he added.

Where to start?

Howard, buddy, if your 94-year-old mother-in-law doesn’t complain about not receiving her Social Security check it’s probably not because she’s "not a fraudster." It’s more likely because her son-in-law is a billionaire.

Can you truly be this stupid?

Money can't buy you class

Also, is it that the ones who are first to call and point out they didn’t get their Social Security check committing fraud? Or is it that they are the ones most in need of it to survive? Funny what things you might do when you begin starving. Like, make a phone call.

Is there fraud? Like in anything, yes. Is it outrageous to pin a fraud label on the poorest seniors just for calling to say their check never arrived? Also yes.

I can find more class in my mom’s work-torn fingers than in Howard Lutkin’s $5,000 suit-clad body.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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