Chained CPI Proposal Creates Republican Disgreement

     From the Chicago Tribune:

President Obama's proposal to trim Social Security's cost-of-living adjustments has sparked not only Democratic outrage, but Republican confusion.

In the days since Obama put the idea in his 2014 budget, Republicans' reactions have included support, opposition and refusal to commit. The proposal was once a mainstay of the GOP's deficit-reduction overtures to the White House.

House Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that the idea, the so-called chained Consumer Price Index, “is the least we must do to begin to solve the problems in Social Security.”

But the chairman of the House Republican Congressional Committee, who is trying to preserve the party's majority in the House in the next election, called it a “shocking attack on seniors.”

“You're trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors and I just think it's not the right way to go,” Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon told CNN.  

That potentially off-message comment provoked swift rebuke from the powerful Club for Growth, the conservative advocacy group that supports the measure as a starting point for reining in spending on government entitlement programs. ...

Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the former Republican vice presidential nominee and the top party guru on budget issues, said the president was to be “commended” for taking on Democrats with the hot-button proposal in the budget. But Ryan panned it as a “modest” attempt at deficit reduction and declined to immediately lend his support.