Free Republic

Medicare as we know it is thus not an option. The choice is between, on the one hand, a reform that leaves current seniors untouched for life and offers future seniors a guaranteed comprehensive benefit and more choices about how to get it or, on the other hand, cuts that affect both current and future beneficiaries and yet are still likely to fail to avert the program’s fiscal collapse. Mitt Romney offers the first — a plan for saving Medicare without increasing the risk to seniors. Barack Obama offers the second — a plan for raiding Medicare and watching it...

.....Start with the political scare word, "privatization." This accusation works with some voters because many Americans mistakenly assume that their payroll deductions are currently going into a government account with their name on it that will then be paid out when they retire. Privatization conjures up a vision that they will have to provide for their own retirement with no government safety net whatsoever. Sorry to break it to these trusting souls, but there are no Social Security accounts. Today's payroll taxes are spent by today's politicians. And in today's system, future benefits depend on politicians elected years from now...

MUSKEGON, Mich. -- President Bush chided Sen. John Kerry and fellow Democrats on Monday for asserting that Republicans will undermine Social Security, calling the strategy ''the most tired, pathetic way to campaign for the presidency.'' Traveling by bus through the southwest corner of this battleground state, Bush tried to improve voters' perceptions of his domestic policies by condemning Democrats for going negative -- even as he held Kerry's plans up to the harshest possible light. ''I'm running against a fellow who has got a massive, complicated blueprint to have our government take over the decision making in health care,'' the...