Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) got away with pretending Republicans don’t plan to blackmail Democrats into cutting Social Security and Medicare by threatening to sabotage the U.S. economy and refusing to raise the debt ceiling.
This week, Bloomberg Government revealed that if Republicans take back the House of Representatives, they are willing to tank the economy for the sake of cutting Social Security and Medicare and to start privatizing Social Security.
The four Republicans interested in serving as House Budget Committee chairman in the next Congress said in interviews that next year’s deadline to raise or suspend the debt ceiling is a point of leverage if their party can win control of the House in the November midterm elections.
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The Republican Study Committee, the largest group of House Republicans, released a budget plan in June that called on lawmakers to gradually raise the Medicare age of eligibility to 67 and the Social Security eligibility to 70 before indexing both to life expectancy. It backed withholding payments to those who retired early and had earnings over a certain limit. And it endorsed the consideration of options to reduce payroll taxes that fund Social Security and redirect them to private alternatives. It also urged lawmakers to “phase-in an increase in means testing” for Medicare.
As Media Matters noted, experts say that failure to act on the debt ceiling would result in an economic catastrophe.
But on Fox News Sunday today, anchor Shannon Bream allowed House Minority Whip Scalise to try to pull the wool over viewers’ eyes by disguising planned cuts to Social Security and Medicare as GOP plans to strengthen them.
Bream began by confronting Scalise on the proposed cuts. But she framed the GOP plan as a matter of partisan political dispute: “Democrats are pointing to your own documents to tell Americans that you are preparing to cut entitlements,” she said. She read a tweet from a Republican viewer who said cutting Medicare is a deal breaker, adding, “So what’s your answer?”
Scalise dissembled.
SCALISE: Well, the answer is that’s a typical red herring by Democrats and it’s not something we proposed. In fact, we proposed strengthening and shoring up Medicare and Social Security which are both, by the way, headed for bankruptcy if we do nothing.
FACT CHECK: Scalise's answer is a red herring. The “go-broke dates” for both programs were just pushed back a year, to 2035 for Social Security and 2028 for Medicare, as per NBC News. It’s a serious issue but neither is on the verge of insolvency. When the Social Security trust fund is depleted, the government will be able to pay 80 percent of scheduled benefits and Medicare will be able to pay 90 percent. And cutting the programs are not the only way to save them. Newsweek notes, "Democrats have proposed raising income taxes on the wealthiest Americans, allowing Social Security and Medicare to remain solvent without cutting benefits or altering eligibility." Bream didn't mention it.
Scalise went on a long digression about the importance of getting “more people back to work” in order to pay into the programs. Meaning, of course, he wants to cut back on other social safety nets like welfare.
SCALISE: On Day One when [Democrats] came in taking over the House, Senate and the White House is to start paying people not to work, to see more of the welfare programs, where you used to have work requirements in place so that you’d have a real safety net, which we believe in, but why should we be paying people to sit at home when there are companies everywhere looking for workers?
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The government started paying people not to work, that drains programs like Social Security and Medicare, so let’s strengthen those programs and stop them from going bankrupt and let’s also, by the way, stop the government getting in this business of paying people not to work when everybody’s looking for workers right now.
Bream pushed back, probably as much as she could with a Republican on Fox: “But fair to say that pointing your own documents, there are some changes to those programs that would happen,” she said.
In other words, Scalise was lying.
And he kept up the deception.
SCALISE: There’s not anything that we propose in the Commitment to America [about cutting Social Security or Medicare].
Note that Scalise did not say there is no plan to cut Social Security or Medicare, just that it’s not in that particular document. Media Matters points out:
Republican leaders have been cagey about what they will do if they take control of the House of Representatives in November. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) produced a vague agenda last month [the Commitment to America] that The New York Times described as an “an innocuous-sounding set of principles” that was “aimed at uniting members” but was “light on details,” particularly on issues where the party’s traditional positions are unpopular.
But the party’s real strategy is quite specific...
Scalise immediately segued away from that subject to start attacking Democrats for raising taxes (nobody mentioned that’s effectively just for high earners). Then he got back to deceiving about Social Security.
SCALISE: If nothing happens, there would be automatic cuts in law. We don’t want that to happen and so we’ve brought forward legislation to stave off cuts to Medicare. We want to stave off cuts to Social Security. Democrats haven’t supported any of that. They want the programs to go bankrupt. That’s not a good thing. We don’t want Medicare and Social Security to go bust, like the Democrats right now have us on a track to do.
Bream changed the subject.
Scalise was also caught lying this week over the January 6th insurrection. As Morning Joe demonstrates in the second video below, Scalise joined Rep. Jim Banks (Tucker Carlson’s son’s boss) in suggesting that Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed calling for help when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. But, as Morning Joe also demonstrated, the Jan. 6 hearing this week showed Scalise clearly watching as Pelosi called the National Guard.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Bream never brought it up.
You can watch Scalise try to hoodwink viewers about Social Security and Medicare below, from the October 16, 2022 Fox News Sunday. Underneath, the October 14, 2022 Morning Joe proves Scalise a J6 liar.
The Republican Study Group plan embraces the approach of the Heritage Foundation and their paper from a decade ago. It goes far beyond just raising the eligibility age and means testing, although both of those actions are included. The HF plan has not been widely circulated itself in several years, but it can still be found online – and it’s something everyone should read. The HF plan calls for Social Security to be reduced to a flat benefit of the equivalent of $1200 per month (theoretically in 2010 dollars). This drastically reduced benefit would only be available to people seeing less than 55K per year in retirement outside of SS payments.
I’ll note that while this flat amount would be about what the average monthly SS payment is (if they actually did adjust for inflation, which I find doubtful), it also would mean that literally tens of millions of people who were eligible for higher benefits of at least twice that amount would suddenly get a massive cut. And that’s if they were even considered eligible for anything under the new rules. The HF plan had the idea of slowly phasing in and really only applying to people born after 1985. The Republican Study Group says they would make the drastic cuts applicable to anyone age 54 or younger. For those keeping track, that would mean anyone born in 1968 or later.
Heritage has noted in more recent articles that its plan would save over 640 billion dollars over the next several years. Which makes sense, since they’d drastically be cutting and/or eliminating benefits from so many of the potential recipients that would have received them before this change. I’ll also note that Medicare would essentially become a means-tested voucher system.
And the reason that angry Right Wingers want this approach is that it would turn SS and Medicare into welfare for the indigent elderly and make a point to most Americans that “you can’t count on the government for anything”. Which has been the approach of angry Right Wingers going back several decades. If they get away with these changes, it’s only a matter of time before they move to completely abolish the programs. Which would become a lot more possible given that most of the country would no longer see any benefit from those programs even after paying into them for decades.
This is the exact approach that the GOP had intended to take in 2019, but was unable to push as they’d lost their majority in the House and could no longer present it. The fact that they’re seriously trying to push it again and threatening to capsize the economy to do it should be chilling to anyone paying attention.
Social Security and Medicare can easily be stabilized by several common sense measures – including lifting the cap on applicable earnings and making a minute increase in the employer side of FICA payroll taxes. But angry Right Wingers have refused to do these simple things for decades, in the hopes they could starve the programs and force everyone else to agree to slashing them.
It is beyond despicable that Scalise thinks he can get away with accusing Dems of trying to bankrupt these programs when it is people like Scalise who have actually been working to make that happen.
