Officials: Obama drops budget cost-of-living trims
Source: AP via Huffpo
Officials: Obama drops budget cost-of-living trims
JIM KUHNHENN | February 20, 2014 12:39 PM EST | AP
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House says President Barack Obama's upcoming budget proposal will not include his past offer to accept lowered cost-of-living increases in Social Security and other benefit programs. Those had been a central component of his long-term debt-reduction strategy.
Officials said Thursday that those potential reductions in spending, included in last year's Obama budget, had been designed to initiate negotiations with Republicans over how to reduce future deficits and the nation's debt. But Republicans never accepted Obama's calls for higher tax revenue to go along with the cuts.
One official said the offer would remain on the table in the event of new budget talks but that it would not be part of the president's formal spending blueprint for fiscal 2015.
The official was not authorized to comment by name on the budget plan before its March 4 release and spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20140220/us-obama-budget/?utm_hp_ref=homepage&ir=homepage
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It's still there, and there is no reason for that. 
for exactly as long as the Third Way finds it useful to create hostage situations to justify other vicious austerity measures.
I see the predictable, dishonest Third Way lecturing has already begun upthread...the garbage suggestion that all these threats have somehow been merely decorative and haven't harmed a soul...
'It's always on the table, and nothing ever happens!'
What a reeking load of bullshit. The manipulative threat of cutting Social Social Security is precisely *how* corporate Democrats have been able to inflict vicious austerity on Americans as effectively as they have. Without the threatened axe of Social Security cuts (which kept returning as the austerity kept escalating), they would never have been able to sell the vicious budget and social program cuts they HAVE inflicted on Americans...by justifying them as the lesser of two evils.
If you had told us a few years ago that the Barack Obama administration would be presiding over government spending that assaults the poor even more viciously than the RYAN plan, we would never have believed it. Yet that is exactly where we found ourselves, surrounded by corporate mouthpieces exhorting us to be grateful "because he didn't cut Social Security."
The cuts were offered by the President and put in his budget, and they have been used to inflict vicious austerity on millions of Americans. They *will* happen when the Third Way is finished using the threat of them to justify and implement all these other, very real, assaults.
The Third Way are vicious, manipulative, Koch-funded vipers who have pulled this government and this party so far right over the past five years that the middle class is eviscerated. And now we have the Orwellian spectacle of a Democratic President making pretty speeches about income inequality while simultaneously keeping a plan to steal the subsistence checks of the poor "on the table" and fast-tracking a "trade agreement" that will hand national sovereignty to the corporations that will finish us off.
These are not "centrists." These are corporatists hell-bent on looting this country into destruction.