The GOP's Sick Priorities

[seafan]

Robert Scheer:

July 12, 2011

THow deceptive for politicians to stress “entitlements” when they talk about gutting Social Security and Medicare, two programs long paid for by their beneficiaries. The Republicans make it sound as if they’re doing us a favor, cutting government waste by seeking to strangle America’s two most successful domestic programs. And now Barack Obama seems poised to join their camp in undermining the essential lifeline for most of the nation’s seniors, many of whom lost their retirement savings in the banking meltdown.

These threatened programs are not government handouts to a privileged class, like defense contractors and bailed-out bankers, who do feel eminently entitled to pig out at the federal trough. On the contrary, Social Security and Medicare have been funded by a regressive tax that falls disproportionately on working middle-class income earners, while caps in the system leave the wealthy—most notably the hedge fund hustlers who helped cause today’s economic crisis—largely untaxed.

While there are many plausible ways to ensure the future of Medicare and Social Security—and extending a fair share of the burden to wealthier individuals is a good place to start—such changes should not be considered in the context of a bargain to raise the debt ceiling. These programs have nothing at all to do with a national debt that has spiraled out of control in the past four years as a result of untethered corporate greed. In that time the debt—already inflamed by two wars fought on the credit card while President George W. Bush cut taxes for the wealthy—rose a whopping 50 percent as a consequence of the deepest recession in 70 years, brought on by the banking collapse.

.....

It is absurd that Medicaid, along with Medicare and Social Security, is on the chopping block when there is no serious effort to find savings in a defense budget equal to that of the rest of the world’s nations combined, and still at Cold War era levels despite the lack of a sophisticated military enemy. And that the GOP-led House has gotten a supposedly progressive president to consider doing serious damage to our most vulnerable population in order to placate Republicans determined to continue massive tax breaks for the wealthy is morally obscene.

Both Social Security and Medicare can be fortified beyond our lifetime by substantially increasing the amounts paid into the system by the wealthy in our country. And in the case of Medicare, expanding it to cover every man, woman and child in the United States will provide the cost containment that will only come from cutting out the Big Insurance Middle Men as they sit behind walnut desks, withholding health care from as many vulnerable people as possible, to pad their bottom line.


It is really that simple. And it is why certain politicians and their wealthy benefactors go out of their way to avoid looking at the only solutions that will work. They are paid handsomely not to look.


These people are, indeed, morally obscene.



One more thing.



AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais


Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid SHOULD NEVER have been used as a bargaining chip in this cynical debt ceiling debate. These programs are the treasured outcome of who we are as a people, in our desire to care for the old, the sick, the disabled, the orphaned children, the widowed and the destitute in our society. These programs should be untouchable. We fought and bled and demonstrated for these protections. They should NOT be used as an offering to placate people who want to destroy them.


The legacy of holding these programs sacrosanct has now been breached.


And it never had to happen.

[DJ13]

1. K&R

[silverweb]

2. K&R.

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