The privatizers

Watch out, grandma! Emboldened by three statewide wins that had nothing to do with them, Congressional Republicans are finally feeling bold enough to admit what has been true for a very long time: they really, really want to privatize Social Security and Medicare. Right now, there are at least a half dozen prominent Republicans in office, or running for Congress in the top tier, who are on the record as favoring Social Security and/or Medicare privatization on some level. They include:

• [Corrected] Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, whose budget House Republican leaders are ducking and hiding from, without saying they oppose it;
• California Congressman Devin Nunez, an arch-right winger who disvafors the idea of separating church and state, and who introduced the privatization bill with Ryan (click here to see the co-sponsors of the Ryan “roadmap”);
• Texas Congressman Jeb Hensarling, who says cut seniors’ benefits and then privatize Social Security;
• Missouri Senator Kit Bond, who says Medicare should be replaced with vouchers to purchase insurance;
• Fellow Missouri Sen. Roy Blount (who says Medicare should never have been started in the first place;
• Tennessee Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn
• Michelle Bachman, who says Americans must be “weaned off” Social Security and Medicare“
• Pat Toomey, the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania and former president of the pro-privatization Club for Growth, who was still pushing the idea of Social Security “private accounts” in 2007, as the U.S. economy careened toward callapse, taking millions of Americans’ 401Ks (which presumably would be the equivalent of their new, privatized Social Security plans,) with it;
• And in Florida, gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum, and Senate candidate Marco Rubio, both of whom have been on record as favoring at least partial privatization of one or both programs. (Rubio also has the backing of the Club for Growth.)
• **New addition: Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, who wants to take Social Security “off budget” (meaning, privatize it)

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UPDATE: TPMDC combs through the Ryan “shadow budget,” and finds what else is in it: deficit-exploding tax cuts for the rich, and the elimination of taxes on corporations. Read it here. BTW, Ryan’s budget also includes a “consumption tax” that’s eerily similar to a sales tax replacement for property taxes that was floated by Marco Rubio when he was Florida’s House speaker…

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To Rubio for a moment. The candidate, who so far has gotten little scrutiny from the media, beyond larding up stories about him with tea party mythology, has been officially endorsed by a guy called Grover Norquist. And who is Grover Norquist?

Read more

The right has not given up on getting rid of Social Security (and Medicare)

In fact, the only thing that has changed in 80 years is that Republicans don’t hide it anymore. During the Bush II years, privatizing Social Security, which would funnel literally trillions of dollars into the open arms of Wall Street investment firms, was floated, and quickly killed, by the president and his allies in Congress. But those who thought the idea was dead have got another thing coming. Read more

Whatever, Max

Max Baucus just won’t go away. Now, he’s trying to win back some street cred by sicking the Medicare watchdog on insurance companies who have been sending misleading scaremail to seniors, in advance of those companies losing their Medicare Part D bonus money from the government. Thanks, Max. Well done. Now kindly take your horrid health insurance company enrichment bill that those same companies’ lobbyists wrote for you and get lost.

Meanwhile, Slate’s John Dickerson says if you son’t like the Baucus “Max Tax” bill, blame the president.

Michael Steele confuses, humiliates himself (again)

It’s no fun ridiculing Michael Steele when he does such a thorough job of it himself. This time, he stumbles on NPR, where anchor Steve Inskeep befuddled the screwball RNC chair over contradictions between his so-called “Seniors Bill of Rights” — barring cuts to Medicare, and his tooootaly genuine, “conservative” opposition to public health programs … like Medicare. The idea was floated in Steele’s recent WaPo op-ed, which was laughable for lots of reasons, the notion that Medicare sucks so we must preserve it exactly the way it is because it’s so great, but not great enough to duplicate for the rest of us, being just one of them. Listen as Steele becomes agitated when the contradictions in his ever-evolving position are pointed out:

Meanwhile, the wingers are for the duplicity, but worried about the long term:

Actually, I think the fact that the head of the RNC’s been reduced to taking this position at all proves the necessity of stopping ObamaCare now, even if it means a Faustian bargain. Such is the British dependency on universal health care that even Tory leader David Cameron is forced to regularly reassure Britons that conservatives “support the NHS 100%.” We’ll be hearing the same thing — or worse — from Republican presidential candidates about ObamaCare within a decade if America chokes down this crap sandwich. Do what you have to do to hold the line.

And that, my friends, is the real point of all this. Republicans fear what LBJ knew when he told the Democratic Chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, Wilbur Mills, in 1964 regarding Medicare that “there is not anything that has happened in my six months, or that will happen in my whole term, in my judgment, that will mean more to us as a party, or me or you as individuals than this piece of legislation.” Wingers fear, not that Americans will hate universal healthcare, but they will like and come to depend on it, and that it will become an untouchable for “drown the government in a bathtub” conservatives  … just like Medicare.

For history junkies: Read up on the fascinating history of how Lyndon Johnson got Medicare passed, here.

In case you missed it: Rachel Maddow disrobes Dick Armey

Okay don’t get grossed out – not that way (yuck!) … She gets him to admit on “Meet the Press” yesterday that he actually opposes Medicare and Social Security, something I doubt the grannies he claims to be saving from Dr. Kevorkian are aware of. Watch (and notice how much hand movement the red-faced Armey engages in. It’s almost hypnotic!)

Armey is following the lead of the right’s hero, Ronald Reagan, who gave a speech opposing another “socialist” healthcare takeover by the gov’mint … once again: Medicare!

So let’s say it together, seniors: what the Republican conservative movement wants is to take YOUR hands off your Medicare, by killing it. And your Social Security, too. Talk about pulling the plug on grandma!

And now, for a word from Nancy Pelosi, circa 2002, during the debate of George W. Bush’s giant donut hole prescription drug bill:

“When Medicare went into existence, there was a big fight over it. The Democrats wholeheartedly supported it; the Republicans opposed it.

They still oppose Medicare. Over the years, they have made statements to that effect. Newt Gingrich, when he was Speaker of the House, said that he would like to see Medicare, in his words, ‘wither on the vine.’ And the Republican Majority Leader, Dick Armey, said that Medicare should be ‘no part of the free world.’ And in the debate in the Rules Committee early this morning, Congressman John Linder referred to Medicare as a ‘Soviet-style model’ that the Democrats were proposing.

They didn’t support it then, and they don’t support it now.

Tags: <Conservatives, Dick Armey, Healthcare reform, Medicare, Meet the Press, News and politics, Politics, Rachel Maddow, Right wing nut-jobs, Social Security>