Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) issued a stark warning to supporters: Republicans are willing to create a crisis pitting “America’s seniors against America’s disabled” in order to gut Social Security.
“We’ve known for years that Social Security Disability Insurance is set to run low in 2016, and most people assumed that another bipartisan reallocation was coming,” Warren wrote in an email to supporters on Wednesday evening. “But now, thanks to the Republican ideological war on our most important national safety net, disabled Americans could suddenly face a 20% cut in their Social Security checks next year.”
House Republicans quietly passed a rule change last month that would block Congress from being able to make routine tax revenue transfers between the Social Security retirement and disability funds, commonly referred to as reallocation, unless the program’s overall solvency is improved.
Like Warren, other liberal Democrats, like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), have vowed to strongly resist Republicans’ move.
“They want to dramatically slice Social Security, so we negotiate and compromise a small cut in Social Security,” Brown said in an interview with TPM. “No, that’s not the way you negotiate.”
Republicans’ claim that this is about budget balancing is nonsense, Warren said.
“Republicans want to pretend this fight is all about dollars and cents. But at the end of the day, this is about a lot more than accounting: It’s about our values,” Warren said.
No, Senator Warren…they already concocted a crisis to dismantle Social Security…they have claimed that Social Security is going to go bankrupt, but if they hadn’t, you know, done something like steal all the money it was making in order to fund their wars and the Military Industrial Complex, it would go on into perpetuity.
Of course, I blame Prescott Bush and his cronies for starting the War on The Elderly.
It’s also about logic: if the Repubs were genuinely concerned about budget balancing, they would take obvious steps to increase the revenue flowing into the Social Security program by, for example, raising the income level subject to the FICA tax. The fact that such a fix is “off the table” or “dead on arrival” (choose the meme) demonstrates conclusively that dollars and cents are irrelevant here.
The new Republican act is the same old, tired and screamingly obvious act for anyone with more than a handful of working neurons. Why else the racist and violence-tinged wars on logic, facts and science joining their century old battle against social progress?
That’s not news to those of us who read TPM, but i’m thankful Sens. Warren and Brown are out there rallying people against these conservative ideas (plots?).
Crushing Social Security has been a goal of the richest since 1936 and used to be fodder for the jokes of Will Rogers. It just ain’t funny any more. Not to mention that this would never have happened if not for “Citizens United.” Well-meaning people must offset this by establishing a step-by-step strategy exactly as the oligarchs have done to get this far. It all starts with unraveling the entire banking system as it has grown to be under a form of useless “self-regulation” because those who regulate the system are in and of that system, hence are “experts.” Yes, they are experts at saving their system to the detriment of everyone else’s. America was a much simpler place when farming was our biggest economic sector. Those old rules cannot suffice in today’s world.