Smoke and Mirrors Is Not the Solution
The President revealed today that cuts to Medicare and Social Security are on the table in the debt ceiling negotiations. According to the Washington Post, President Obama will propose significant reductions in Medicare spending along with changes to Social Security as possible solutions to the debt ceiling crisis. Once again Washington seems to have chosen older Americans as the solution to their years of out-of-control spending. It’s not right and it’s a breach of trust with all Americans.
Washington is using all the tricks of a magician as they try to fool Americans into going along with cuts to these lifesaving programs. In a well-polished, sleight of hand move, they are working to convince us that Medicare and Social Security are broke and must be fixed. What’s broken is their habit of spending like a drunken sailor for decades; spending that has caused America’s trust fund to disappear. As President Reagan once said, “at least the drunken sailor was spending his own money.” In an age-old magician’s trick, they try to divert our attention by telling us our current budget ceiling problems and deficits were caused by Medicare and Social Security. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s the elected politicians and the unelected bureaucrats in Washington that have given us Obamacare, bail-outs, extended foreign wars, and who have perpetuated the housing crisis that caused the problem. It’s this “big government spending because big government is the solution” approach that has caused the biggest two-year addition to our debt in our history.
It seems that Washington will use whatever smoke and mirrors illusion required to steal from those who have paid into the trust fund their whole working life. For instance, one of their “solutions” is to instigate a chained CPI in determining the yearly impact of inflation and the resulting cost-of-living-adjustments (COLA). What they are proposing will make an already flawed calculation (the one that said we’ve had ZERO inflation in the last two years) even worse. This chained CPI proposes that the present calculations have been OVER-paying us!!! They calculate that by using this new method they can save around $60 billion over 10 years. What this really means is the government can withhold $60 billion from deserving Americans. No amount of smoke and carefully placed mirrors can hide the fact that when the government withholds money it is really a tax, pure and simple. It is raising taxes on older Americans to pay for the out-of-control spending in Washington.
While RetireSafe has championed a bill, HR 1086, that directs the government to calculate a fair and accurate CPI, the new proposal being discussed in the secret debt ceiling meetings goes in exactly the opposite direction. Rather than correcting the wrong that has existed for decades, robbing older Americans every year, the politicians are now proposing to extract even more from those who have the least number of options. Washington is searching for every source of money they can find and seem not to care about the promises they have made to America’s seniors.
RetireSafe asks all Washington politicians to quit thinking that Medicare and Social Security are the solutions to the debt and deficit problems. We should change the name of the “trust fund,” because there is no trust and there is no fund. Let’s not worsen the problem by cutting Social Security checks and further squeezing Medicare to reduce access and benefits. Let’s break the mirrors and clear the smoke. Let’s look older Americans in the eye and keep the promises we’ve made to this Great Generation!