2006:
“Too many of us [on the left] have been interested in defending programs the way they were written in 1938."
I asked the president-elect, "At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform, entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?" "Yes," Obama said.
"Yes," Obama said.
President Obama on Thursday officially established a bipartisan commission to propose ways by December to rein in the growing national debt...As he did so, he was flanked at the White House by his choices for co-chairmen, Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican Senate leader from Wyoming, and Erskine B. Bowles, a centrist Democrat from North Carolina who was President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff.
President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.
...what we had offered Speaker Boehner was over a trillion dollars in cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and defense. We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.”
It won’t be pleasant. But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs.
This morning, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and a gazillion other major media outlets are reporting that President Barack Obama’s newest offer, like Boehner’s, embraces the use of the “chained consumer price index,” a formula for calculating inflation that would reduce the growth of Social Security benefits by making annual cost-of-living adjustments smaller.