New budget chair Tom Price, same old destructive ideas.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) isn't the chairman of the House Budget Commitee anymore, having moved on to a more and powerful position as Ways and Means chair, but his destructive policy vision for the country's well-being lives on. The new Budget chairman, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA)
made that very clear in a speech to fellow conservatives at the American Action Forum. He wants them to come up with the plan to gut Social Security.
“By the time a child born today is able to vote, the Social Security trust fund will be insolvent. When today’s preschooler enters college, the Medicare trust fund will be insolvent,” he said. […]
Price suggested there is a lack of urgency both on Capitol Hill and across the country to take action.
“It is clear to me and certainly to others that the critical mass that we need in order to move forward doesn’t exist, at this point, in Congress,” said Price, who added that it also doesn’t seem to exist across the United States.
Price said he’s purposely isn’t proposing legislation yet because he wants to hear first from the public.
Price's existing budget, like Ryan's, would turn Medicare into a voucher program—nine years from now—and turn Medicaid into state block grants, a proposal
certain to eventually kill the program. He, like Ryan before him, hasn't gone so far as to put substantive cuts to Social Security into a budget. But that doesn't mean Republicans have abandoned the idea.
No, what they suggest is yet another bipartisan commission that will figure out how to cut Social Security. Because that has worked so well for them in the past. Like Ryan, Price doesn't want his fingerprints on Social Security cuts. No Republican does. Make an unaccountable, preferably not elected, committee make that decision—that's always the solution.
The good news is that Democrats seem to have finally come around to the idea that cutting Social Security isn't the solution, not when there are sound policy options to not just strengthen it, but to expand it.