OK, there it is. Republicans are coming for your Social Security and Medicare to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

Really.


Mitch McConnell says it out loud: Republicans are gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare next




All Washington seems to be buzzing this week over a single question: Is Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) deliberately trying to throw the election to the Democrats?

At the root of the debate are interviews the Senate majority leader gave to Bloomberg and Reuters on Tuesday and Wednesday. McConnell identified “entitlements” — that’s Washington code for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — as “the real drivers of the debt” and called for them to be adjusted “to the demographics of the future.”
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The novel element about GOP declarations of hostility to social insurance programs this time around is that they persist in blaming the deficit on the programs, which are mainstays for middle- and low-income Americans despite their having just passed a budget-blasting tax cut for corporations and the wealthy that is estimated to cost some $2 trillion over the next 10 years.

That’s not pure conjecture. The U.S. Treasury calculated the federal deficit in the 2017-18 fiscal year ended Sept. 30 at $779 billion, close to the Congressional Budget Office calculation of $793 billion. That’s the largest federal deficit since 2012, when the government was still spending to assist recovery from the 2008 recession.

The CBO projects the current fiscal year deficit at $973 billion, and says it expects annual deficits to exceed $1 trillion into the next decade. The CBO attributed much of the deficit to “recently enacted legislative changes. … In particular, provisions of the 2017 tax act.”

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-mcconnell-social-security-20181019-story.html