Why Republicans Now Believe They Can Get Away with Gutting Social Security and Medicare

- Daily Kos, Nov. 4, 2022. - Ed.

If American voters decide to turn the House, Senate, or both chambers of Congress over to Republican control on Nov. 8, Republicans have helpfully begun to outline how they intend to reward those voters. The “rewards” are impactful: by raising the Social Security full eligibility age from 67 to 70, reducing Social Security benefits, & drastically increasing the cost of obtaining medical care through the Medicare program, while imposing “means-testing” to determine who will receive Medicare benefits at all.

They intend to circumvent the near-certainty of President Biden vetoing these measures by tying such cuts directly to the debt ceiling, in effect holding the country’s creditworthiness (& the economy itself) hostage to forced cuts in these programs.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Republicans have threatened such cuts. Their intent has been made clear for decades, to the point where warnings from Dems about the GOP’s plans to cut Social Security & Medicare may have begun to seem like a constant refrain, casually dismissed as recurrent background noise by some voters because such drastic cuts have never actually come to pass.
But this time they are providing specifics—not because their own constituents would approve (they don’t, by huge margins)—but because they believe that they can sufficiently distract & misinform their own voters from their intentions by incessantly demonizing Dems & focusing entirely on “hot button” grievances through their now almost wholly insular (& perpetually funded) media organs & social media.

Those media organs—most visibly Fox News but now virtually all right-wing outlets—have effectively created a hermetically sealed bubble of reflexive, automatic distrust & dismissal of anything Democrats do or say, while simultaneously portraying Republican elected officials as blameless for any of the country’s problems. In short, they are out to prove that there are no more “third rails” in politics, when your electoral base is, for all intents & purposes, conditioned into believing whatever you tell them to believe.

As reported by Jim Tankersly, writing for The New York Times: Congressional Republicans, eyeing a midterm election victory that could hand them control of the House & the Senate, have embraced plans to reduce federal spending on Social Security & Medicare, including cutting benefits for some retirees & raising the retirement age for both safety net programs. GOP senators have been a bit more coy about their plans, since control of the Senate is still very much in play, although, as Tankersly reports, “Their ideas include raising the age for collecting Social Security benefits to 70 from 67 & requiring many older Americans to pay higher premiums for their health coverage.”

House Republicans, on the other hand, who stand a much better chance of achieving control after the November midterms, have been more forthcoming...
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/4/2133165/-Why-Republicans-now-believe-they-can-get-away-with-gutting-Social-Security-and-Medicare
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- 'Means test' (See US), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_test