Social Security

Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green was on MSNBC’s The Ed Show yesterday, explaining how Democrats shouldn’t embrace politically disastrous cuts to Social Security benefits and instead should follow the lead of Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) Mark Begich (D-AK) and talk about expanding benefits.

National Review Online writer Kevin Williamson was on MSNBC today and claimed that Medicare and Social Security benefits are not important for seniors and that it would be best if they went “broke."

The think tank Global Policy Solutions released a report that should cast further doubt on chained CPI. It finds that, if enacted, chained CPI “will disproportionately harm African Americans who have dramatically fewer sources of wealth to draw upon compared to whites.”

“Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Social Security is totally funded by the payroll tax levied on employers and employees," Reagan said during the 1984 Presidential Debate. "If you reduce the outgo of Social Security, that money would not go into the General Fund to reduce the deficit, that would go into the Social Security Trust Fund."

We need a transformational president who will rouse Americans to address the challenges we face, not a transactional mediator who offers preemptive concessions to get a deal that ignores those challenges. Deficits are not our problem.

President Obama picked the very day that new job creation collapsed to propose a deflationary budget deal featuring cuts in Social Security and Medicare. This is perverse economics and worse politics, on several grounds.

The loud, insistent calls in Washington to rein in the rising costs of Social Security and Medicare ignore a major and expensive entitlement program — the military's health care system.

President Obama has gone against his word by pledging cuts to Social Security that he himself took off the table when he was a candidate for President in 2007.

Why do policymakers focus so intently on the deficit issue? Because the small minority of wealthy individuals that see the deficit as the nation’s priority have more clout than the majority that didn’t.

There are few areas where the corruption of the national media is more apparent than in its treatment of Social Security. Most of the elite media have made it clear in both their opinion and news pages that they want to see benefits cut.