Krugman reviews Social Security, Medicare and Republicans

Krugman summarizes GOP plans 

Amid the desperate attempts by Fox News and its subsidiary, the Republican Party, to insist that Biden's true claims about GOP efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security are false, worth remembering some history 1/ 

Ronald Reagan tried to make significant cuts in Social Security in 1981, but backed down in the face of a huge public backlash 2/

FIRST MAJOR CUTS IN SOCIAL SECURITY PROPOSED IN DETAILED REAGAN PLAN (Published 1981)

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/13/us/first-major-cuts-in-social-security-proposed-in-detailed-reagan-plan.html

In response the Cato Institute called for a "Leninist" approach (their term), setting the stage to exploit future crises to dismantle Social Security 3/

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1983/11/cj3n2-11.pdf

Cato also created a Project on Social Security Privatization, which drew up plans for that happy event 4/ ssa.gov/history/report…

In 2005 George W. Bush tried to move forward with that plan, although conservatives insisted that calling it "privatization" (which polled badly) was a left-wing smear; meanwhile Cato quietly changed the name of its project 5/ 

Stepping back a bit, in 1995 Newt Gingrich shut down the government in an attempt to force Bill Clinton to make major cuts in Medicare and Medicaid 6/

https://www.history.com/news/bill-clinton-government-shutdown-lewinsky-affair

After the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, Paul Ryan pushed a plan to convert Medicare into a voucher system, although as with "privatization" he insisted that calling vouchers vouchers was a left-wing smear 7/

Understanding Rep. Ryan’s Plan For Medicare

Are vouchers the same as premium support? Will seniors’ health care look like that offered federal workers? A guide to some of the questions and issues in the House Budget chairman’s pl…

https://khn.org/news/ryan-plan-for-medicare-vouchers-vs-premium-support/

So now we have Rick Scott saying that just because he called for sunsetting Medicare and Social Security he wasn't calling for sunsetting them. Biden used the same words Scott did 8/ 

Let's also add that if you have absolutely no intention of ever cutting Social Security and Medicare, you don't set up a process where the entire programs have to be reapproved every five years. As Biden might say, c'mon, man 9/ 

So let's not act as if Biden was engaged in some kind of gotcha. For more than three decades Republicans have been trying to eviscerate SS and Medicare whenever they thought they had a political opportunity to do so 10/