Monday, June 21, 2010

Brace Yourself for Another Assault on Social Security and Medicare

The peerless Dean Baker sounds a warning: the wingers will soon be making another run at privatizing Social Security and Medicare.

Today he writes:

Next weekend will feature another milestone in the drive to cut Social Security and Medicare. The organization America Speaks will be hosting a series of 20 meetings in cities across the country. They will ask the people at these meetings, a cross section of the nation, to come up with proposals for dealing with the country’s projected long-term budget deficit.

The way the problem is outlined for these meetings virtually guarantees that most of the participants will opt for big cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The results of this song and dance exercise will then be presented to President Obama’s fiscal responsibility commission on June 30th, which will use it as further ammunition for plans by its co-chairs to gut these programs.


Baker dissects the propaganda used by America Speaks -- the bad economics, the omissions, the bias. Read the whole thing here.