Obama’s Entitlement Promises

[Geee]

National Review:


‘We’re going to have to take on entitlements, and I think we’ve got to do it quickly. We’re going to have a lot of work to do, so I can’t guarantee that we’re going to do it in the next two years, but I’d like to do it in my first term as president.”

That was candidate Barack Obama back in October of 2008, responding to a question from Tom Brokaw about how soon Obama would, if elected, move to reform entitlement programs, which Brokaw described as “a big ticking time bomb that will eat us up maybe even more than the mortgage crisis.” (Funny how this sense of urgency has all but evaporated in the mainstream media.)

So, with a little over a year left in Obama’s first term, how’s it going? One need look no further than the Standard and Poor’s report explaining its decision to downgrade the United States’ credit rating. The ratings agency describes the recent debt-ceiling deal approved by Congress as insufficient because “the plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.” Which is basically a polite way of saying “big ticking time bomb.”
Throughout the debt-ceiling debate, Obama insisted that he was willing to “put everything on the table” and “get serious” about entitlement spending, and claimed to have offered $650 billion in savings over ten years. He’s talked vaguely about raising the retirement age and mean-testing benefits. But all this would have been more convincing, however, if he had bothered to put forward a plan in writing. House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) cited the fact that Obama was “adamant that we cannot make fundamental changes to our entitlement programs” as a primary reason for his decision to abandon “grand bargain” talks with the White House.