QOTW: Sherrod Brown
by digby
I didn’t want to let this comment from Senator Brown to Greg Sargent pass without comment because it’s really, really great that Democrats are finally starting to use this kind of rhetoric. Greg writes:
With Washington chatter centered on a “grand bargain” or at least a “mini bargain” that might involve entitlement cuts, expanding Social Security might seem like a dead end. But when I pushed Brown on whether Dems would rally behind the idea — after all, Chained CPI is in the President’s budget — he insisted Dems should not cooperate in allowing a “Serious” center-right consensus that equates “fiscal responsibility” with cutting entitlement benefits to reign unchallenged.
“The Serious People — with a capital S and a capital P — all have really good pensions and good health care and good salaries,” Brown said. “Raise the cap. There are ways we can bring a lot of money into Social Security. Some Democrats are a bit cowed by the Serious People.”
Brown argues that if Republicans push for Social Security benefits cuts as part of any deal, Dems should counter with the Harkin proposal to shift the terms of the debate in a Democratic direction. Democratic priorities, he said, should be centered on the idea that declining pensions and wages (and savings) are undermining retirement security, and added that the public strongly opposed gutting social insurance.
“The situation for seniors is only going to get worse, because the assault on pensions and wages is making it more and more difficult for a worker to save for the future,” Brown said. “Why are we having a debate over how much we are going to hurt seniors? The debate should be over how we should structure a pension for seniors that will help them. Why would we play on their playing field? Democrats need to play offense here. Force Republicans to say what it is they really want to do. Republicans just don’t like social insurance.”
That’s right. They don’t like social insurance. And sadly, the majority of elected Democrats, including our allegedly liberal president, have failed to grasp just how vital those programs are to millions of citizens. Instead they bought into the self-serving propaganda set forth by some of their wealthy donors that the richest country in the world can no longer afford to ensure that the oldest and sickest members of society can live in dignity. Even more infuriating, they continue to insist that they are only doing it to buy “credibility” so they can “get it off the table” at which point the conservatives will sing kumbaaya and allow them to advance a more progressive agenda. If there’s anything that’s been proven over the last couple of decades of Democrats balancing budgets, creating surpluses, slashing programs and shrinking deficits to be fatuous rubbish, it’s that.
This is the wealthiest nation on earth and we don’t bat an eye at the fact that we spend more than every other country combined, including Russia and China, on our military, much of it expanded in recent years because a small band of fanatics with box cutters and home made pressure cooker bombs have declared us their enemy. The idea that we must literally take food out of the mouths of babies, seniors and the disabled because we are “going broke” is so ludicrous under that circumstance that it isn’t worthy of discussion.
Good for Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren and others who are acting like real leaders rather than well-paid lobbyists for Pete Peterson. It’s long overdue.
Also too: Krugman