This made me feel a lot better:
The Social Security chained CPI and Medicare changes that the president has expressed support for — do you think those will happen in this presidency?
No. The chained CPI is a terrible idea — the worst thing about a president who I generally admire. The notion that old ladies living on $1500 a month in downtown Boston should be penalized is just bizarre. If we’d got the hell out of Afghanistan this year instead of waiting a year, there’d be no need to do the chained CPI.
Putting off Medicare or Social Security [retirement age] is a terrible idea. If you are a woman who started waiting on tables at the age of 18, and 47 years after carrying those hot dishes around, you’re ready to retire, I think it’s an outrage to say we’re going to make you have to schlep those dishes around another three years.
Chained CPI is an outrage. I don’t understand how anybody who wants to talk about diminishing inequality can be for exacerbating it, which is what the chained CPI does.
Making Medicare more income-tested at the right level and reducing third-party payments to insurers — those I support. But to get the chained CPI, the president has said he wants a big tax increase. I don’t see enough Republicans voting for a tax increase, and I think he will have a hard time getting a lot of Democratic votes for cutting back on the cost of living for old people.
Once Boner slices and dices the 30 or 40 T-baggers in the House today, there will be no further legislation out of that place for the next 12 months. The Republicans will spend that time trying to kill each other off.
I hope, oh do I hope, that Barney Franks is right on this.
But…here’s a DKos article about how very hard Obama has worked to set up the crisis conditions to achieve his Great Betrayal of SS and Medicare:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/10/1245508/-President-Obama-Gave-Speaker-Boehner-the-Debt-Ceiling-to-Play-With-in-2010
Read, weep, and for sure remember the halcyon days when Obama had the chance to just let the Bush tax cuts expire per the sunset provisions…. But Obama didn’t, nor did he work the debt ceiling into that legislation. He wanted as many chances as he could get to create crises so that he could try to pass his Great Betrayal.
I do not trust this Barry Obama. I never voted for him because I saw him as the puppet of the Corporatists. And, I hoped then I was wrong. It’s hard to hope he’ll act like a Democratic president going forward.
I fear he is too conditioned to be the Corporatist running dog lackey to break out of that mold now.