In a surprising and totally unexpected move today, President Obama declared his intention to commit political suicide. According to the President he has chosen Social Security and Medicare cuts as his preferred method of accomplishing this.
The president’s renewed efforts follow what knowledgeable officials said was an overture from Mr. Boehner, who met secretly with Mr. Obama last weekend, to consider as much as $1 trillion in unspecified new revenues as part of an overhaul of tax laws in exchange for an agreement that made substantial spending cuts, including in such social programs as Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security — programs that had been off the table. >
http://www.nytimes.com/...
I have had serious doubts about President Obama's commitment to the basic principles of the Democratic Party for quite a while now, but this is the last straw for me.
Quite a campaign slogan is in the making "I cut your Social Security and Medicare for you with the help of my Republican buddies. Please vote for me anyway. Hey, I'm not ALL bad."
This just enrages me.
Is there a politician left in the government who actually wants to protect the social welfare that has been the bedrock of our society for the last 75 years? I'm beginning to wonder.
Social Security pays for itself for the next 25 years. Medicare gets into trouble, not because of any fault of the program but because the services Medicare pays for are escalating in cost at a much more rapid rate than inflation in general. The solution is to get medical services expenses in line with the rest of the world, where the same services are half as much as in the United States.
Please share your thoughts on this development and whether it is something a Democratic President should be doing as the highest representative of the Democratic Party legacy.
If these cuts are actually legislated into law, whatever the final form those cuts take, I would be very interested in hearing from the politically shrewd political analysts at DKos their opinion as to how in the world this maneuver helps President Obama's re-election prospects or helps the strength of the Democratic Party in the voters' eyes.
All I see is lose-lose here.