Jan 12, 2015

Can The President Be Trusted On Social Security?

     From Dylan Scott writing at TPM:
TPM asked multiple times last week for the White House's position on the House action, but never received a formal response, a stark contrast to the loud public pronouncements of Brown, Warren, and others. It also invokes the uneasy relationship between the White House and Social Security advocates, who were dismayed by Obama's willingness to accept cuts to the program during the 2011 grand bargain talks with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

"Advocates do not trust the president on Social Security," Monique Morrissey, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told TPM last week. "If he blinks and they message this right, it could be something."
Nancy Altman, co-director of Social Security Works, told TPM that while the Obama administration "hasn't been great on this issue," she sees encouraging signs in Obama's recent appetite for confrontation on issues like immigration.
"Our hope is that he'll be that way on Social Security, too," she said. "But if you look at past history, you can't be confident that that's what will happen."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

To answer your question in a word: no.

But hopefully there are enough dem senators who do to prevent anything major.

Anonymous said...

No. Obama has already signaled his willingness, even desire to sign on to benefit cuts as part of his Grand Bargain. He would've already slashed benefits as part of the 2011 debt ceiling deal, the only thing that stopped him was teabagger infighting.

Americans cannot count on Obama to save earned benefits programs, when he's already all but said he agrees with the Republican approach to "reform", by which they only mean cuts.