House Republicans Call for $2.7 trillion in Social Security and Medicare Cuts

Donald Trump had just about climbed out of the very deep hole he’d dug for himself last week when he went on TV and talked loosely about “cutting” programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Then along came the Republicans in the House of Representatives on Wednesday dragging him right back into it.

In a document that deserves extraordinary credit for chutzpah, if maybe not tact, House Republicans have just proposed a budget that would slash an astonishing $2.7 trillion from combined spending on Social Security and Medicare over the next decade — more than 8% of the total.

This isn’t just touching the third rail of American politics. It’s throwing your arms around it while soaking wet.

They also talked about raising the U.S. retirement age at some point in the future, the better to reflect rising life expectancy, though they left open the date for making such a change.

Those proposals come from the Republican Study Committee. This is not the official Republican leadership group, but it is not a fringe caucus, either. Its membership includes 178 House Republicans, or more than 80% of the total.

The committee hardly made matters any better in an election year by leaving the details vague.

As we’ve mentioned here before, talking about “cutting” entitlements — and especially Social Security — is ambiguous. Future retirement benefits per person are expected to rise faster than inflation. Someone can slow that growth — or ice it altogether — and still say they haven’t actually “cut” anything.

But if lawmakers aren’t clear about what exactly they plan to do, voters may be apt to fear the worst.

Especially if those legislators also talking about making deep tax cuts — namely, extending the 2017 tax cuts indefinitely. Something’s got to give.

The document from the Republican committee will raise yet more concerns, especially among seniors and those in middle age, that the GOP is coming for their retirement benefits. (...)

The latest proposals are sailing into the wind, too. More Americans than at any time in recent history want to shore up Social Security’s finances by raising taxes rather than by curbing the program’s growth. According to a recent poll by Gallup, the tax raisers outnumbered the benefit curbers by a full 30 percentage points, or a ratio of two to one: That’s 61% for raising taxes, 31% for reining in benefits.

That gap is double what it was when Gallup conducted the poll in 2015 and in 2005, and triple what it was in 2009. 

by Brett Arends, Marketwatch |  Read more:

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[ed. Republicans have been calling for cuts in government spending ever since Reagan. In fact, it's been essentially their entire platform for decades. Cuts in taxes, government programs, services, regulations, enviromental protection, healthcare, consumer protections, libraries, parks, arts, infrastructure, etc. Basically everything that makes a country great and run efficiently. In the case of this particularly shameful effort, they might alternatively consider cutting the military's roughly $800 billion annual budget by half or a third and achieve the same result in just a few short years (vs. grandma having to eat more ramen and cat food, which, I guess is still better than eating missles). But no. That would detract from their real priorities: more policing, immigration enforcement, incarceration, sweetheart government contracts, privatization of public resources, and overall worldwide domination (military/economic/political, etc). Those are the things that really animate and matter. See also: House Republican budget calls for raising the retirement age for Social Security (NBC); and, Historical Background And Development Of Social Security (SSA).] [Update: this bit of humor (from the NBC link). Republicans hate Obamacare and its subsidies, preferring widespread privatization instead, but then propose the same thing for Medicare:

"The new budget also calls for converting Medicare to a "premium support model," echoing a proposal that Republican former Speaker Paul Ryan had rallied support for. Under the new RSC plan, traditional Medicare would compete with private plans and beneficiaries would be given subsidies to shop for the policies of their choice. The size of the subsidies could be pegged to the "average premium" or "second lowest price" in a particular market, the budget says. (...)"

"The RSC budget launches blistering criticism at "Obamacare," or the Affordable Care Act, and calls for rolling back its subsidies and regulations that were aimed at extending insurance coverage."