Fatuous argument ‘o the day: destroying SS in order to save it edition
by digby
There’s an interesting Politico piece this morning examining Barack Obama’s record as a class warrior. (I know, I had a good laugh as well.) I’m going to delve into more later today, but I wanted to just highlight this quote from David Axelrod, which reflects one of the main lines of argument coming from the White House as to why we need to do all this right now:
Among Democrats there is division over whether Obama is squandering his victory by embracing in his new budget the idea that popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare must be trimmed to make them more affordable. Many liberals believe that this stance represents a surrender, in politics and substance alike, in what is their side’s most potent class-conflict weapon.
But to Obama loyalists, Democrats must act now to preserve their hallowed New Deal and Great Society accomplishments so they’re not emasculated later under a Republican president.
“The most persuasive case for reforming Medicare is saving Medicare,” said Obama strategist David Axelrod. “You don’t want to see the Big Bad Wolf making those decisions.”
To quote my friend DebCoop:
Axelrod “You don’t want to see the Big Bad Wolf making those decisions.”
This argument has the same rhetorical cadence and validity as this…
We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Condoleeza Rice
And it’s just as eye-rollingly absurd. The idea that these cuts will permanently “take it off the table” is completely ridiculous. And I don’t think they believe it either. They can’t. They just aren’t that dumb.
What will happen is that in a year or two when the projections show that the Chained-CPI didn’t “solve the problem” and Social Security will still need to be shored up temporarily 25 years from now, the Democrats will go back to some of the other “helpful” proposals they’ve floated in the last couple of years such as means testing and raising the retirement age. To “save” the system, don’t you know. (I can guarantee that now that they’ve shot their wad on temporary tax hikes on millionaires for deficit reduction, there’s little to no chanced they’ll come back for another bite at that apple for a good long time.) So yeah, we’ll be “saving” it over and over again until there’s nothing left to save.
Sadly, as David outlines in the post below, the cult of personality surrounding this presidency means there is every likelihood that they will get away with it, at least this time. The White House endorsement is apparently all it takes to make the degradation of the New Deal programs acceptable to a whole lot of Democrats.
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