Obama the Technocrat

President Obama proposed a budget this week that includes significant cuts to Social Security and Medicare.  Under Obama’s proposal, the government would stop linking Social Security benefits to inflation (CPI) and instead peg them to the slower growing chained CPI.  The President also wants to start means testing parts of Medicare so that wealthier Americans pay more for their healthcare.  The budget reveals what most progressives should (but often don’t) acknowledge – Obama is a technocratic centrist, deeply concerned with the deficit, who wants to cut major social programs.

Until Obama’s presidency, an ideological cornerstone of the Democratic Party had been preserving and expanding universal healthcare and pension benefits.  This proposal helps destroys that.  Don’t be fooled by the policy lingo.  “Chained-CPI” and “means testing” is bureaucratese for “cutting the shit out of and rocketing down the slippery slope.”  Chained CPI means that oldies in the future will earn less in real terms than their gray haired predecessors – they’ll actually be poorer, not better off at a slower rate.  On Medicare, Obama’s means testing makes the most efficient health insurance policy in the country vulnerable to further dissolution towards an incredibly distorted, pseudo-privatized stipend.  In summary, Obama’s plan is a substantial attack on core social programs benefitting the infirm and elderly.

The proposed budget is also completely in line with the president’s past policy positions.  President Obama has been pushing Medicare and Social Security cuts for years now.  He included $716 billion in Medicare cuts in the Affordable Care Act, has often urged Congressional Democrats to support changes to Medicare and was more than willing to increase the eligibility age for Medicare as part of his illusory “Grand Bargain.”  His willingness to cut SS benefits is also not horrendously surprising.  This is the president, after all, who threw away the public option, renewed the Bush tax cuts repeatedly at 20 cents on the political dollar and has signed off on deficit reduction proposals that have been 80/20 program cuts to tax increases.  Obama’s basically doing synchronized dolphin kicks in the deepest currents of mainstream techno-centrism, while his left-wing apparatchiks continue to claim he’s Marx Spitz riding the revolutionary wave.

Many of these true believers will try to hang their hat on the argument that the president’s budget is a strategic ploy. The New York Times reports that the administration is trying to “create cracks in the Republicans’ antitax resistance” by setting up a situation where, if Republicans obstruct, “most Americans will blame [the GOP] for the fiscal paralysis.”  The Times explains that “in a significant shift in fiscal strategy, Mr. Obama… will send a budget plan to Capitol Hill that departs from the usual presidential wishlist” by moving directly to a “final compromise offer.”  By leaking all of this, is the White House really giving away their gameplan?  What kind of poker player tells his opponents that he’s going to bluff with a shit hand and hope that they fold?  It’s much more likely that administration officials are disseminating this story, painting Obama as a savvy liberal looking to advance a progressive agenda by trading minor entitlement cuts for significant boosts in social programs and revenue, in order to mitigate the political backlash he’ll face from his attack on incredibly popular social programs.

President Obama believes in cutting Social Security and Medicare because he thinks the nation can’t afford to provide seniors and the infirm with the healthcare and pension benefits that we once did.  This budget doesn’t mark a departure from the “presidential wishlist” – this is Obama’s wishlist.