Playing Chicken with Seniors

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Last February, President Obama named Clinton White House staffer Erskine Bowles and former Republican senator Alan Simpson to co-chair a bipartisan commission to address the federal budget deficit and the coming crisis in entitlement costs. Recently, the two men announced proposals to limit the national debt to a more manageable level of gross domestic product and cut the budget deficit significantly.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lost no time in declaring the Bowles-Simpson Plan "simply unacceptable." She, along with most of her Democratic colleagues, opposes considering the modest modifications in Social Security the Plan suggests: increasing the retirement age and reducing benefits for higher earners.

Pelosi and the Democrats will have far more principled company in opposing the latter change, even though it would make Social Security more progressive by targeting the neediest qualifying recipients. Means-testing Social Security would turn a program designed to be an individual tax-funded social safety net into a welfare plan. Many proud seniors who would qualify under proposed guidelines, but who never accepted social welfare while employed, will surely object to a means-based formula for being "awarded" a benefit they paid to receive.

Democrats have been playing games with Social Security for decades, both in their use of the issue itself and their misuse of its benefits.