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Jun 9, 2010

Deficit Commission Taking Aim At Social Security

From the Washington Post:
One of the oddest Web posts making the rounds in Washington is a series of blurry videos from Capitol Hill showing people coming and going from a closed-door meeting of President Obama's new deficit commission.

The mundane scenes have a sinister cast for activists who say the commission is at work on a secret plan to gut Social Security. Nancy Altman, whose group, Social Security Works, shot the footage, says the threat to the nation's primary social safety net is greater now than at any time in the program's 75-year history. ...

[S]everal groups, including MoveOn.org and the Campaign for America's Future, are threatening to make Social Security an issue in the midterm elections.

"It's likely to be a pretty full court press," said MoveOn campaign director Daniel Mintz, whose group plans to ask candidates to sign a pledge opposing Social Security cuts. "We're going to demand solutions to the deficit that make corporations and the rich pay their fair share of taxes, rather than cutting benefits and squeezing the middle class." ...

Five years ago, when then-President George W. Bush proposed carving out a portion of Social Security taxes to create private retirement accounts, a coalition of progressive groups and advocates for the elderly organized to smother the plan. Even in a Republican Congress, the idea went nowhere. In 2006, Democrats campaigned against the plan and regained control of Congress.

Now some of the same groups are watching Obama's commission closely. They note that many of its members have publicly advocated cutting Social Security, including co-chairman Alan Simpson, a former GOP senator from Wyoming, who has chastised "greedy geezers" for fighting to protect their retirement checks while their grandchildren face a towering debt.

"Social Security is not the problem. It's simply becoming the target," said Barbara Kennelly, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

6 comments:

  1. I thought it was always the evil Republicans that were gonna gut Social Security. Whoops.

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  2. OMG can you give it a rest. The deficit alone will be over a trillion dollars annually for years to come. Cutting all federal employees' salaries by 50 percent would not be a blip on that.
    Half the population pays no federal income taxes, so they have no stake in the process. The highest earners pay most of the taxes already. The problem is overspending, period.

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  3. We really don't need the Deficit Commission now, Obama is going to cut the budget five percent. LOL

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  4. If this is true, and I don't know that it is, cutting Social Security is serious and needs to be addressed. Whether it is Democrats or Republicans, we have a contract with American citizens to provide them with the benefits they have been promised. The greedy bankers, stock market, oil companies, etc. should not derail us from keeping our commitments. The same goes with the never-ending wars, natural disasters, and foreign economic woes. This is when our citizens should come first. I think this will need to be a major issue for mid-term elections.

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. And don't forget the greedy politicians in Congress and the White House who have given massive amounts of bailout money to "the greedy bankers, stock market, oil companies, etc" because doing so helps keep them in office... and does/did nothing to help the economy. The economy is you and me, and consumer spending determines everything about the economy that is not exported... and I don't think the US exports much anymore....

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