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.

Stand Up Fight Back Old-Timers!

With the sequester looming, some Democrats have joined conservatives in calling for changes to Medicare, an alarming political strategy for those who care about that program, which could lead down the slippery slope to privatization.  Yuval Levin from the right-wing (and beautifully inane sounding) Ethics and Public Policy Center presented the typical conservative position in the New York Times Tuesday when he argued that raising Medicare’s eligibility age to 70 and means-testing benefits for wealthy Americans is a wonderfully reasonable “compromise” position that will “[target] benefits to those who most need them.”   Funny how that targeting always involves cutting benefits rather than increasing them.

Amazingly, some leading Democrats have offered similar opinions.  In his State of the Union address, President Obama suggested the nation “ask more from the wealthiest seniors,” echoing his earlier statements of support for means-testing Medicare benefits.   Obama also tentatively agreed to an increase in the Medicare retirement age for wealthier seniors during “grand bargain” negotiations in 2011.  Senators Max Baucus, Richard Durbin and James Clyburn have also signaled they’d be open to means-testing Medicare as part of a broader deficit reduction deal.

Strategies of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and National Organization for Women (NOW) prove that allowing seemingly incremental and innocuous concessions like these would be a major strategic setback for supporters of universal social programs.  The NRA is fucking nuts.  The organization has effectively silenced any federal research on the effects of guns on mortality by using their political influence to reduce Center for Disease Control firearms safety research by 96 percent since the mid-1990s.   It vigorously opposed Clinton’s assault weapons ban, opposes the current effort to ban a few types of assault weapons, and even opposes the modest background checks recently proposed by the president.   In short, the NRA refuses to support any new gun regulations, even if they make sense on the surface and would save lives.

The National Organization for Women is also unrelenting in pushing their agenda.  NOW strongly opposes mandatory ultrasounds, fights against any restrictions to Planned Parenthood funding, strongly went after proponents of a proposed DC abortion ban for women after the 20th week of pregnancy, has weighed in against parental notification laws and opposed “partial-birth” abortion restrictions.   NOW fights back extremely hard against all attempts to restrict abortion rights, using its full rhetorical and financial arsenal to fight its enemies.

The NRA and NOW recognize that, although some proponents of gun control and abortion restrictions really do want to take a small number of limited and arguably sensible policy steps, many other gun control activists and pro-lifers want to drastically restrict gun and abortion rights.  Uncontested assault weapon bans and background checks would embolden many gun control activists to push further, just like unopposed late-term abortion restrictions and parental notification laws would encourage pro-life activists to advocate for even stronger anti-abortion laws.

The NRA and NOW use full force, with no compromise, and have been largely successful.  If believers in keeping our “entitlement” programs universal and democratic hope to replicate this success, they should be deeply disturbed by the signals emanating from Democratic leadership, and should be doing everything within their means to kill any changes in the retirement age or introduction of means-testing.