“Prominent Republicans are billing the moves as necessary to rein in government spending, which grew under both Republican and Democratic presidents in recent decades and then spiked as the Trump and Biden administrations unleashed trillions of dollars in economic relief during the pandemic,” the Times intones, going on to say that influential Republicans have “signaled a new willingness to push for Medicare and Social Security spending cuts as part of future budget negotiations with President Biden.”
I don’t know where in the hell the Times reporters and editors were for the whole of the Obama administration, because there is nothing new about this “willingness.” The paper definitely covered that crisis, and there are dozens of stories about the 2011 showdown the House GOP had with President Barack Obama and the Senate Democrats over the debt ceiling. They printed dozens of stories about government shutdown threats against Obama made by Republicans that involved demands to cut these programs. It’s not a new thing for the GOP, which tells you that they really do mean it.
It also took until the last third of the article for the Times reporters to mention that the threat is to hold the debt ceiling hostage for Social Security and Medicare cuts. “Those comments suggested that, unlike in past negotiations, Republicans could demand future cuts to the programs in order to raise America’s borrowing limit and avoid a default on government debt,” they write.
They do not write that this is the nuclear bomb of budget threats, that defaulting on the government debt would crater the national economy and throw the global economy into chaos. Times readers might realize that, but it would still be a worthwhile thing to point out that this is an economically terroristic threat from the GOP, and not just another policy dispute.
So anyway, yes, Republicans still want to cut Social Security and Medicare—if not for the current generation of retirees, then for the next ones—as a way to continue to undermine the programs. They also want to force major changes to other social safety programs to make more people hurt. Cruelty is absolutely the point, and they want to keep the people at the economic margins of society right where they are.
We can’t let that happen.
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