From Campaign For America’s Future: http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130308/democrats-whod-cut-social-security-and-the-liberals-who-love-them-too-much
By Richard Eskow
March 8, 2013
The spectacle of a supposedly liberal President repeatedly and needlessly trying to cut Social Security is enough to bring a reasonable, economically literate person to the point of existential despair. To see leading liberal lights like Rachel Maddow and Ezra Klein chuckle indulgently at those foolish Republicans in Congress over the subject – Don’t they know he’s already giving them what they want? – is to risk plunging into the depths of that despair.
This week the President hosted a dinner for Republicans leaders where he worked to sell his budget proposal, including his harmful plan to cut benefits through the “chained CPI.” National Security was the main course and Social Security was the dessert. And guess who wasn’t coming to dinner: The elderly, the disabled, or any policy experts who understand the disastrous implications of the chained CPI.
The Maddow/Klein exchange (which we’ll bring to you as soon as a transcript is available) is the crest of a building wave in pro-Democratic Party commentary which says, as Klein puts it, that “what we have here is a failure to communicate.” Klein says that at least “some of the gridlock (in Washington) is due to poor information.” Jonathan Chait bemoans the fact that Republicans ”won’t acknowledge (Obama’s)actual offer, which includes large cuts to retirement programs.“
Silly, silly Republicans. Klein quotes one reporter as saying of the White House, “They tell us three times a day that they want to do chained CPI!”
That’s right: The White House has been trying to impose this benefit cut on Social Security’s elderly and disabled recipients for years, and Republicans don’t even know. Neither do most Democrats, for that matter. They think they voted for a President who will defend those benefits, not work relentlessly to cut them.
But Democrats like Maddow, Klein, and Chait know better. They know exactly what Obama’s been trying to do. And their only complaint seems to be that he’s not doing effectively enough. We’re not hearing much from the ‘left’ side of the debate about the profound flaws, biases, and inherent cynicism behind both the President’s policy and his rhetoric.
Continue reading at: http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130308/democrats-whod-cut-social-security-and-the-liberals-who-love-them-too-much
