{"id":15861,"date":"2015-08-17T14:29:30","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T21:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=15861"},"modified":"2015-08-17T14:29:30","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T21:29:30","slug":"the-republican-plan-for-granny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/17\/the-republican-plan-for-granny\/","title":{"rendered":"The Republican Plan for Granny"},"content":{"rendered":"

Actually, its not fully accurate to say Republicans have a plan for seniors.  They have several.  For seniors that are too poor to buy medicines, Republicans would replace Medicaid with block grants to states, so Republican governors can give that money to billionaires instead of giving granny her medicine.  For seniors on Medicare, they would give Granny a voucher and let Big Insurance cancel her policy, as soon as she gets sick.  For seniors, who die because of the other Republican plans, they have the RepubliCare Death Benefit.  When Granny cannot pay, pro-life Republicans never charge her extra to die.  But the Republican plan for Granny at issue today is their plan to gut Social Security.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"0817Social-Security\"Something strange is happening in the Republican primary \u2014 something strange, that is, besides the Trump phenomenon. For some reason, just about all the leading candidates other than The Donald have taken a deeply unpopular position, a known political loser, on a major domestic policy issue. And it\u2019s interesting to ask why.<\/p>\n

The issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80 last week. The retirement program is, of course, both extremely popular and a long-term target of conservatives, who want to kill it precisely because its popularity helps legitimize government action in general. As the right-wing activist Stephen Moore (now chief economist of the Heritage Foundation) once declared, Social Security is \u201cthe soft underbelly<\/a> of the welfare state\u201d; \u201cjab your spear through that\u201d and you can undermine the whole thing.<\/p>\n

But that was a decade ago, during former President George W. Bush\u2019s attempt to privatize the program \u2014 and what Mr. Bush learned was that the underbelly wasn\u2019t that soft after all. Despite the political momentum coming from the G.O.P.\u2019s victory in the 2004 election, despite support from much of the media establishment, the assault on Social Security quickly crashed and burned. Voters, it turns out, like Social Security as it is, and don\u2019t want it cut.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s remarkable, then, that most of the Republicans who would be president seem to be lining up for another round of punishment. In particular, they\u2019ve been declaring that the retirement age \u2014 which has already been pushed up from 65 to 66, and is scheduled to rise to 67 \u2014 should go up even further.<\/p>\n

Thus, Jeb Bush says that the retirement age should be pushed back<\/a> to \u201c68 or 70\u201d. Scott Walker has echoed<\/a> that position. Marco Rubio<\/a> wants both to raise the retirement age and to cut benefits for higher-income seniors. Rand Paul<\/a> wants to raise the retirement age to 70 and means-test benefits. Ted Cruz<\/a> wants to revive the Bush privatization plan.<\/p>\n

For the record, these proposals would be really bad public policy \u2014 a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half<\/a> of the income distribution, who depend on Social Security, often have jobs that involve manual labor, and have not, in fact, seen a big rise in life expectancy. Meanwhile, the decline of private pensions has left working Americans more reliant on Social Security than ever\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <NY Times<\/a>><\/p>\n

Granny beware!  Click through for the remainder of this fine Paul Krugman editorial.,<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Actually, its not fully accurate to say Republicans have a plan for seniors.  They have several.  For seniors that are too poor to buy medicines, Republicans would replace Medicaid with block grants to states, so Republican governors can give that money to billionaires instead of giving granny her medicine.  For seniors on Medicare, they would […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15861\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}