Yesterday, President-Elect Barack Obama visited the headquarters of the Washington Post for a sit-down interview with the editorial board. He had a very wide-ranging interview with the editors, touching upon the problems in the Middle East, and on the present economic crisis.
Here's President-Elect Obama's comments on the need to reform Social Security and Medicare, casting them as "entitlement" programs, which is a right-wing buzzword often used by present Republicans.
Five days before taking office, Obama was careful not to outline specific fixes for Social Security and Medicare, refusing to endorse either a new blue-ribbon commission or the concept of submitting an overhaul plan to Congress that would be subject only to an up-or-down vote, similar to the one used to reach agreement on the closure of military bases.
"Social Security, we can solve," he said, waving his left hand. "The big problem is Medicare, which is unsustainable. . . . We can't solve Medicare in isolation from the broader problems of the health-care system."
Medicare, the government health program for retirees and the disabled, is projected to be insolvent by 2019, according to the most recent report by the Social Security and Medicare trustees. Over the next two decades, Medicare spending is expected to double, consuming nearly one-quarter of the federal budget.
And President-Elect Obama has been in deep conversation with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and the Blue Dog Coalition, which is a group of 51 conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives, about the state of the budget. The Blue Dog Coalition believes in the mantra of "pay-go" in which every new government spending item must be paid for with cuts elsewhere in the budget, and they've insisted that the stimulus bill have tighter spending limits.
President-Elect Obama should be listening to the 71 members of the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives instead. Elana Schor, the new reporter at TalkingPointsMemo
talks about the Progressive Caucus in her post on the ideological factions behind the push for the stimulus bill.
The Progressive Caucus: Co-chaired by Reps. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), this group released their stimulus wish list in mid-December, with a focus on job creation, foreclosure relief, and a proposed new energy block grant to help cities shift towards a more sustainable grid. These lawmakers are those most likely to be pulling the emphasis away from tax cuts and towards the type of outside-the-box infrastructure projects that would help end the nation's dependence on dirty fuels. The progressives also are not shy about insisting on a $1 trillion bill. Unfortunately, they had slightly more members than the Blue Dogs at last count but their political pull, historically, is weaker.
We should be lobbying the members of the Progressive Caucus to push for more government spending, rather than tax cuts, and to approach President-Elect Obama on this. The longer they remain passive, the more influence the Blue Dogs Democrats will have on President-Elect Obama's economic stimulus, which will not be good for us in the long-run.
These Blue Dogs voted for the FISA amendments, they voted for the Iraq war, and they voted for the Patriot Act. In short, they are not the kind of progressives that we need to push for big ideas---they are the kind of people that favor Republican fiscal policies. They're the wrong people to listen to, especially on Social Security and Medicare reform.
Here's Digby's take on Obama's use of the right-wing buzzword "entitlement programs":
I believe that everything about this is a huge mistake. It validates incorrect right wing economic assumptions, incorporates their toxic rhetoric about "entitlements," focuses on the wrong problems and continues the illusion that social security is in peril when it isn't. The mantra of shared sacrifice sounds awfully noble, but it isn't very reassuring to talk about the government going broke at the moment, particularly when the cause of our problems isn't the blood-sucking parasites who depend on government insurance when they can't work, but rather the handiwork of the vastly wealthy who insist on operating without restraint and refuse to contribute their fair share. I would have thought that a bipartisan commission on financial system reform might have at least been on the agenda before social security.
Obama is empowering the Republicans and the Blue Dogs with this fiscal responsibility rhetoric and perhaps he believes they will reward him by acting in good faith. And maybe they will.Or perhaps he thinks he can jiu-jitsu the debate in some very clever way to actually bolster social security and enact universal health care. But it's a big risk. I believe that all this talk about "entitlements" and fiscal responsibility will make it much tougher to sell universal health care and easier to dismantle some of the safety net at a time when many people have just lost a large piece of their retirements, their jobs and their homes. It's very hard for me to understand why they think it's a good time to do this.
I know it's probably right that we give him a chance before we completely go postal about this, but I also know that if this were a Republican saying these things I'd certainly be doing everything in my power to oppose it. But then that's the beauty of the Nixon goes to China gambit, isn't it? It neatly shuts down the most fervent opposition. That's why it's so frightening. He might just get it done.