The Looming Specter of "Entitlement Reform"

It was only a matter of time, but Speaker of the House Otto the Orange John Boehner has brought the topic of "entitlement reform" into the ongoing, entirely odious budget/deficit "debate:"

House Speaker John Boehner plans to begin taking steps this spring to tackle ballooning Social Security and Medicare costs — proposing major cuts to the programs and selling those sacrifices to the American people — and maybe even joining with President Barack Obama to lessen the political risk.

“People in Washington assume that Americans understand how big the problem is, but most Americans don’t have a clue,” Boehner said in an interview with theWall Street Journal published Friday morning. “I think it’s incumbent on us, if we are serious about dealing with the big challenges, that we go out and help Americans understand how big the problem is that faces us.”

“Once they understand how big the problem is, I think people will be more receptive to what the possible solutions may be,” he said.

All I can say to that is this: what a fucking asshole. I can't wait to hear to hear from a man with a net worth well into the seven figures tell us about what a Very Serious Problem that Social Security and Medicare have become, and walk with us as he educates us on how to fix the Very Serious Problem. Here's a hint: his "fixes" and "reforms" won't have anything to do with raising revenue or adjusting the payroll tax/payroll tax cap to make it more robust and solvent. It will be solely driven by cuts and fucking over future recipients, because he wouldn't dare risk the ire of elderly white Social Security/Medicare recipients, otherwise known as the GOP's most reliable voting bloc. 

But there's another part of the article worth highlighting:

And, Boehner said, he’s asked Obama to join those efforts.

“I offered to the president we could lock arms and walk out and begin the conversation about the size of the problem,” he said. Obama responded “positively” to the suggestion.

Incredibly stupid colloquialism and visual image notwithstanding, we are basically screwed. With how this White House negotiates, expect their opening position to be raising the retirement age to 80, and then clapping themselves on the back and grinning like idiots in smug satisfaction, having taken a step toward their beloved demigod of bipartisanship, as they wait for Republicans to "meet them in the middle." And then Republicans come back and tell them to fuck themselves and that the retirement age should be raised to 90, because people are living longer these days you know, and that the payroll tax also needs to exclude millionaires and that won't accept anything less.


Once the "debate" over Social Security and Medicare begin in earnest, expect it to be just another display of our failure of a representative democracy. NBC/Wall Street Journal commissioned a poll this week that couldn't be a clearer illustration of this fact. Here's a graph summarizing what respondents saw as unacceptable cuts:

And a corresponding a graph showing respondent's preferences for deficit reduction:

I almost wish they had presented the same choices in both questions, because I'm willing to bet they might have been close to perfectly inverse. But regardless, it's evident that very few people want to cut Social Security or Medicare, but instead favor a whole other array of fiscal measures that are, for all intents and purposes, off the table and will never be seriously discussed in Washington. Those measures, as displayed above, include a tax on millionaires, ending the Bush tax cuts, ending oil and gas subsidies, and cutting defense (unnecessary weapons). And then there's this:

And Ezra Klein nails it:

We do have fiscal problems in this country: health care, for instance. We have to get growth in that sector down or we'll bankrupt the country. But that's not the case with Social Security. Social Security is just a question of priorities. And the legislators who are saying that we can extend the Bush tax cuts without offsets but that we need massive benefit cuts in Social Security are showing where their priorities lie, not stating a sad economic reality.

And it's absolutely true: if you had even a handful of members of Congress that actually faced the possibility of depending upon Social Security for economic security during their retirement, it would be absolutely untouchable. DC politicians do not need Social Security. Because who really needs Social Security when you have the private sector?