Former Gov. Ted Strickland, and Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, has jumped on the bandwagon for protecting and strengthening Social Security and Medicare through the most obvious and simple solution—lifting the payroll tax cap.
Strickland, speaking before the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans in Columbus, said he favors additional taxes on "the millionaire and billionaire class" to help preserve the retirement system, according to the Columbus Dispatch. […]
Strickland also released a policy proposal online in which he vowed to oppose efforts to privatize Social Security and Medicare, push for a senior issues advocacy program and support tax credits for caregivers.
"Ohio's seniors and their families will know that they are a priority in my U.S. Senate Office, and that I will stand up for them and with them at every turn," the 74-year-old former Ohio governor from Columbus wrote in the proposal.
He's not on the increase-Social-Security bandwagon, yet, but this is a solid statement of principle on a critical issue for Democrats. In addition to raising the payroll tax cap, Strickland's says in his proposal he is opposed to making changes to eligibility for seniors—no raising the retirement age, for example—and to privatizing it. He wants to allow Medicare to negotiate for prescription prices with pharmaceuticals in the same way the Department of Veterans Affairs does, and is opposed to any effort to turn Medicare into a voucher system. And he says he is "proud to support the bipartisan Credit For Caring Act, which provides a new, nonrefundable federal tax credit of up to $3,000 for eligible family caregivers who work and use their own money to help care for a loved one."
Please give $3 to send Ted Strickland bolster the Social Security protectors in the Senate.
Contrast that to the incumbent Republican Rob Portman, who took to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal in 2014 to pledge his commitment to austerity. Railing about the debt and deficit and awful Obamacare and how the old people are going to ruin everything, Portman called for "adjusting Social Security and Medicare's retirement ages, means-testing benefits for upper-income retirees, and supporting broad-based, patient-centered health care" (i.e. Medicare vouchers). In fact, Portman was an enthusiastic supporter of Paul Ryan's numerous budgets that featured the Medicare voucher plan, calling it a "substantive proposal" and voting for it all three times it came to the Senate floor. Pressed on these facts, Portman's office released a lame statement about his "proven record of working to preserve Medicare and Social Security for current and future generations of Ohio seniors so they have safe and secure retirements." Uh, huh.
This is a no brainer, the easiest contrast possible between Democrat and Republican, and good for Strickland for setting it out clearly and definitively this early in the election.