Barack Obama Wants to Gut Social Security and Medicare

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Social Security and Medicaid together do not match Medicare's costs

Really, he just expressly said that to Steve Inskeep of NPR:

Actually, I think that if you talk to economists, both conservative and liberal, what they'll say is the problem is not next year. The problem is, how are we dealing with our medium-term debt and deficit, and how are we dealing with our long-term debt and deficit? And most of that has to do with entitlements, particularly Social Security and Medicaid.

(emphasis mine)

It's not helpful that he leads with a lie.

Anyone who has the vaguest idea of how to count knows that the elephant in the room (pun not intended), is not Medicaid, but Medicare, but Obama realizes that that the political consequences of going after that are simply too dire for him to mess with the seniors.

The alternative, of course, is something private, which means higher costs, since we know that both Medicare and Medicaid deliver healthcare for a lower cost than the private sector, and the expense ratio (the cost of managing the money) for Social Security is on the order of ¹⁄₁₀ that of most private plans out there.

We now understand why Barack Obama has been so deferential to the insurance and finance industries:  It's because they own him, and he wants to sell the rest of us to them.


H/t Gaius Publius.