In a political landscape defined by bitter division, a jarring consensus has emerged from an unlikely duo: a progressive anti-establishment Democrat from New Jersey and the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
Lisa McCormick, a New Jersey Democrat who has long railed against the nation’s financial practices, finds her direst warnings echoed and amplified by none other than Mitt Romney, the former Utah senator, former Massachusetts governor, and 2012 standard-bearer for the GOP.
The point of agreement is not a minor policy footnote, but a chilling diagnosis of American solvency. McCormick has for years asserted that the true measure of the nation’s debt, when combining borrowed money and unfunded liabilities, nears a staggering $163 trillion.
Now, Romney, in a stark New York Times op-ed, paints the consequences of ignoring such figures in apocalyptic terms, describing a “cliff” toward which “all of us, including our grandmas, truly are headed.”
That cliff is the projected insolvency of the Social Security Trust Fund in 2034, which McCormick has often cited to support her plan to “Scrap the Cap” arguing that while most Americans pay Social Security tax on all their earnings, high-income individuals avoid this tax on a large portion of their income due to the current limit.
“If, as projected, the Social Security Trust Fund runs out in the 2034 fiscal year, benefits will be cut by about 23 percent,” said Romney, who warns this would trigger either catastrophic borrowing costs or hyperinflation.
His prescription, a break from decades of Republican orthodoxy, is a stunning admission: “It’s time for rich people like me to pay more.”
“I long opposed increasing the income level on which FICA employment taxes are applied (this year, the cap is $176,100). No longer; the consequences of the cliff have changed my mind,” said Romney.
said McCormick, who earned two of five votes cast in the 2018 Democratic primary election against US Senator Bob Menendez, asserted that Romney’s analysis substantiates her long-held position.
“The math is brutal and nonpartisan,” said McCormick. “When a Republican of Mitt Romney’s stature declares that the survival of the republic requires extracting more from the billionaire class, it reveals a truth too alarming for the political establishment to continue obscuring.”
“Someone earning $200,000 or $20 million will pay the same maximum tax of $21,836.40 in 2025,” said McCormick. “Most people pay Social Security tax on every dollar they earn, as their income doesn’t exceed the cap, but high earners with $1 million in gross annual wage income stopped paying into the program on March 6.”
McCormick said that if underpaid full-time working Americans can struggle with economic pressures, it seems obvious that Los Angeles Lakers star player LeBron James could afford to pay the same rate of Social Security taxes as every American who makes less than $176,100.
“LeBron James is paid over $40 million to play 82 basketball games each year. LeBron’s FICA tax rate is 0.021 percent. That isn’t really fair,” said McCormick. “LeBron is done paying into Social Security during the first quarter of the first game. For the rest of that game, the next 81 games, right through baseball, football & even hockey season, he doesn’t pay another dime.”
Romney’s piece focuses on sealing what he calls “caverns” in the tax code, legal structures that allow the ultra-wealthy to avoid taxes on a scale that dwarfs ordinary income.
He highlights the “step-up in basis” rule, which allows vast capital gains to vanish forever at death, using Elon Musk as a hypothetical example. He targets deferred gains in real estate through 1031 exchanges and the shielding of income via depreciation.
These provisions, he argues, were meant for family farms and stimulating industry but have been captured by multibillionaires.
“The unusual provision makes sense when you’re talking about helping families keep their family farms,” Romney writes. “But it’s used by billionaires to avoid capital gains taxes.”
The political irony hangs in the air, a potent and inescapable fog.
Romney, the avatar of buttoned-down Republican fiscal conservatism, is now championing a core demand of the progressive left: that the largest estates must be means-tested and their tax advantages dismantled.
He explicitly calls for sealing these caverns for “mega-estates over $100 million,” a direct shot at the donor class that fuels both political parties.
McCormick seized on this, arguing that the admission exposes a decades-long failure.
“For years, they maligned us for suggesting the wealthy weren’t paying their share,” said McCormick. “Now one of the architects of the modern GOP confirms the vaults are locked, the yachts are sailing, and the bill is coming due for everyone else. The anger he mentions—the college graduate staring at a 300-foot yacht—that anger is the only rational response to a rigged system.”
“The rich can live lavishly by employing a technique known as ‘Buy, Borrow, Die,’ in which they buy or build assets, borrow against them, and then avoid estate and gift taxes when they die,” said McCormick.
Romney insists his plan is not an assault on enterprise but a salvage operation for capitalism itself, necessary to “quiet some of the anger” and restore faith in the system.
He dismisses the perpetual promise of growth-through-tax-cuts as a corner that never arrives, a truism that has “long rationalized politicians’ failure to act.”
The alliance of McCormick’s grassroots agitation and Romney’s insider reckoning forms a potent indictment of the political status quo. It suggests the nation’s financial red ink has finally pooled so deep it is drowning old ideological lines.
The question now is whether Washington, mired in shallow partisan combat, can hear the alarm sounded from such opposite shores—or if the relentless arithmetic of debt will render their warnings merely a final, bipartisan epitaph.
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