Opinion: President Obama Plans to Cut Social Security Next

President Obama is playing “Watch the Birdie” with Americans over the age of 50, diverting their attention with handouts and scare tactics to hide in plain sight the enormous damage his policies are doing to the retirement safety net.

First it was Medicare. The ObamaCare legislation drops a few free goodies like breadcrumbs in front of Medicare recipients (such as free diagnostics and annual checkups) to draw their attention away from the enormous cuts in Medicare being used to help pay the freight for the new national healthcare system...

In his Saturday radio address on August 14, President Obama revealed he is already moving on to cut Social Security.

But again, he is playing "Watch the Birdie," this time using scare tactics rather than sweeteners.

In that address, he denounced the idea of solving Social Security’s problems by allowing young workers the freedom to voluntarily choose to save and invest some of their taxes in their own personal retirement accounts, an option federal employees already enjoy. The president rejects fixing the Bernie-Madoff Ponzi scheme currently used to finance Social Security with some form of personal accounts to begin pre-funding Social Security with real saving and investment. Instead, he rails about “privatization,” an incendiary (and false) characterization of voluntary personal retirement accounts intended to scare the bejeebers out of the American people.

Leaks indicate that among the options being considered are delaying the retirement age (sounds like a panacea to bureaucratic pencil pushers who never did a day of hard labor in their lives), changing the basic benefit formula to reduce future benefits, and delaying or slashing COLAs...

In addition to the other cost savings I posted earlier, the government should go on a strict no new hire diet.

If someone retires, do what private industry has to do and move people around to cover the gaps.

It took decades to get here and downsizing government via attrition is one of the least painful ways I can think of to reduce the debt and get the government back into its constitutional cage.

We need to push the out of balance private vs public employee balance back toward the private sector so as to have more producers.

“You could defund every bit of discretionary spending except for Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs in the 2010 budget, eliminate every single agency from Agriculture through HUD and Education and IRS and NASA and on down to Transportation, and you would still have a budget deficit of over $1 trillion.

Any one who honestly thinks that the budget can be balanced without touching Social Security and Medicare is fooling themselves.”

No disagreement with what you are saying, but a big part of eliminating those agencies, etc. is that Congress would be demonstrating that it was serious about the task. The public needs this assurance when you’re talking about cuts to entitlement programs that directly affect individuals.

And the flip side of the coin is that, if Obama and his wrecking crew weren’t destroying so many private sector industries and jobs, the government would be taking in more tax revenues, and all things being equal, the size of deficits would be reduced.

You raise some valid points. But, OTOH, we have near 20% real unemployment (when all factors are considered), and boomers and even younger Americans living off hardship withdrawals to retirement accounts, etc. It’s difficult enough for a lot of people to care of their immediate families, let alone take in more family members (who may require a lot of assistance).

And those are the very reasons that families should pull together. Families will return to God and find comfort in the closeness of loved ones. Elders can supply needed knowledge to the younger generation about, "how to make it through." Younger Americans who grasp the idea of family and that charity starts at home, will survive.

I didn't say this would be wonderful or easy. In fact, I said for some this would be the most difficult of situations, but really...what are you going to do with your elders when they can't afford a nursing home? We can guess what the government health care solution will be.

Heck isn't that really what part of this thread is all about? Are we going to continue to depend on the Federal Government to take care of our family? We're so ingrained with this SS idea, that we can't and won't consider how life would change without it. And sometimes you have to go through hard times to get to the good times. Our country turning back to God and Family isn't going to be easy, but God didn't have the Israelites roam the desert for 40 years for nothing.

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