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Jewish World Review July 22, 2011 / 20 Tamuz, 5771 Mean opposition to means-testing By Jay Ambrose
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"… the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."
Many liberals who want to soak the rich with taxes also want to soak the poor to give the rich welfare, not the least of these hyper hypocrites being the only confessed socialist in the U.S. Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
We could pick on others, but let's pick on him as the first winner of the Mencken Alarmist Award given by me to whatever hoaxer has best lived up recently to the above quote. Sanders did it to perfection in a California speech.
He took on the balanced, thoughtful Medicare reform plan courageously put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., telling his audience — get ready to clamor — that it would produce death panels, not disputed Sarah Palin death panels, but real death panels under which 45 million Americans just might perish, G0d bless their souls.
That's a large pile of bodies, and I guess it's enough to upset anyone, although it's an obvious phantom invented by this politician who is paid $174,000 a year to know better. Maybe he really, honestly doesn't, in which case the people of Vermont really, honestly ought to vote to put him on a pension instead of the salary.
He also ought to know that if you do not reform Medicare, there will eventually be no Medicare, and he ought to know that means-testing — extending aid to the people who need it and not so much to the people who don't — is one way to begin to get there.
Ryan has it in his Medicare plan. The Heritage Foundation wants more means-testing for both Social Security and Medicare. The majority on President Barack Obama's sadly neglected debt commission think it's a good idea for Social Security, as does Peter Orszag, former budget director under Obama. Sanders, however, hopes to rescue Bill Gates from being one of the 45 million corpses.
Why the solicitude from a senator who has never met a rich person he didn't wish to strip of all belongings so they can be given to folks as poor as he'd like the rich to be?
Doesn't he know that the people footing the entitlement bill include minimum wage earners and that the elderly include many of the best-off people in the country?
Is he aware that fewer and fewer people are going to be supporting more and more recipients, causing one of my friends to advise me to choose my worker well?
The answer of course is politics. If the rich and near-rich don't get theirs, he figures, they'll turn their backs on the programs. I hope not, but even if there is a risk, it's crucial to act because Medicare spending is going crazy, we've spent Social Security surpluses on other things and we borrowed $37 billion last year to make up for it. There is no way to tax our way out of what's now a $61.6 trillion unfunded liability.
Nobody is proposing means-testing that will affect current recipients or anyone for years. It would be phased in gradually. And by the way, it probably won't be enough. You might have to make Sanders happy by also raising the income cap on Social Security taxes. You might have to raise the retirement age. You will certainly want to slow benefit growth for the better off through a revised indexing formula for initial benefits.
But we need to understand that the whole range of safety-net programs and entitlements constitute 60 percent of our budget while defense comes to roughly 20 percent, meaning everything else is 20 percent. If we don't address entitlements, we don't address the debt and the great American experiment could maybe go kerplunk. And that's not hobgoblin talk.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here. Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.
• 07/20/11: Leftist babble makes debt crisis even worse • 07/18/11: Time to raise demagoguery ceiling • 07/13/11: Obama treating treaties badly • 07/08/11: Is decline of U.S. exaggerated? • 07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery
© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
