White House blasts McCarthy for comments on strengthening Social Security, Medicare

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The White House hit back after Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he wants to “strengthen” Medicare and Social Security, arguing on Sunday that the House GOP leader and his conference actually want to slash spending on the entitlement programs.

McCarthy said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” earlier Sunday that he wants to take cuts to Medicare and Social Security off the table in talks with Democrats over the debt ceiling, even though Republicans do want commitments on spending cuts generally. Instead, McCarthy said Republicans were committed to strengthening the programs.

The strengthening of entitlement programs laid out in the Republicans’ “Commitment to America” is vague. One of the legislative recommendations made in the plan is that Congress must “must be prepared to make reforms to extend the solvency of the entitlement programs.”

The White House rebuked the Speaker’s claim, saying on Sunday that Republicans have wanted to cut earned benefits for years.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/white-house-blasts-mccarthy-comments-184113297.html

[Walleye]

1. When a Republican says they want to reform something, run for your life

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. Kremlin Kevin wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare.

All according to plans laid out and refined over the course of 40 years.

MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan’s outpost at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters of corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors. Together they could push economic ideas to the public through media, promote new curricula for economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.

At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.

[ ... ]

She observes, for example, that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to “reform” public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around those, even if you don’t agree. Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america

[Lettuce Be]

3. Why are they calling it an "entitlement program?" It is not

We pay in, our employers pay in, and that is the rub. They want to eliminate your employer needing to contribute, thus lowering their taxes, and you get less compensation. Win/Lose.

It is not now nor was it ever an entitlement and I'm really tired of the way our media uses language to purposely obfuscate what social security even is.

[Skittles]

6. entitlement means the fact of having the right to something

we have the right to something we have paid into

[Duncanpup]

9. Exactly

[Tickle]

4. Bush wanted to privatetize

SS in 2000. If memory serves me correctly. If a person dies before retirement they could leave what was collected to their family. That was the catch all

[wishstar]

7. Bush's privatizing plan involving Wall Street was going to cost taxpayers over a trillion to convert

I'll never forget how as soon as he won reelecton in 2004 he claimed a mandate to change SS when he had barely mentioned anything before about changing SS. His plan was so unpopular it was immediately shuttled and thankfully so because stock market crashed disastrously by end of his 2008 term.

[Tickle]

8. I only remembered the act

Your memory is better than mine.

[Cha]

5. Kev is a Weak Gaslit Groveling

Liar.. FO, Idiot.

[Wounded Bear]

10. When they say "strengthen" it always seems to involve cutting or privatizing...

neither or which are good ideas.