Sen. Jeff Sessions questioned the valued of extending the temporary payroll tax cut for another year this morning at a press breakfast hosted by The American Spectator and Americans for Tax Reform. 

“As a matter of financial responsibility, there’s nothing easy about it,” Sessions remarked, after explaining that the plan proposed by Senate Democrats would permanently raise taxes on higher income earners for only a one-year reduction of the payroll tax. The Alabaman also expressed doubt about the economic value of a payroll tax holiday. “It’s not a tax cut, I don’t think,” he said. “Social security is a trust fund, it has trustees, they have bonds when they loan to the federal government….We’re talking about having 160 million Americans not pay in to their retirement.”

Sessions’s remarks about the trust fund put him at odds with other prominent Republicans, including Governor Rick Perry, who has referred to Social Security and its trust fund as a “monstrous lie” on the campaign trail. 

Nevertheless, Sessions predicted that the break would be extended in the Senate eventually, acknowledging that “probably some solution will be reached” while declining to go into detail about what the final measure might be.