@Lash,
Lash wrote:Video of him bragging about trying to cut Social security permeates the internet, but I do see how all the resident Centrists just prefer to lie about it.
Biden vs. Sanders on Social Security and Medicare
By Robert Farley
Posted on January 24, 2020
Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden have been trading barbs over Biden’s record on Social Security and Medicare. Sanders accuses Biden of saying “on many occasions we should cut Social Security,” and Biden accuses Sanders of lying and using a “doctored” video to mislead voters about his position.
Biden’s campaign has focused on a short video clip circulated by the Sanders campaign of a Biden speech in 2018 in which he appears to express praise for former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s tax plan passed during Trump’s presidency — words that the Biden campaign says were delivered sarcastically. Given the way certain phrases were delivered and a fuller context of Biden’s comments,
it was misleading for a Sanders campaign staffer to claim that Biden said “‘Ryan was correct’ to go after Social Security & Medicare.”
However, other examples cited by the Sanders camp show that
Biden has in the past been willing in budget negotiations with Republicans to at least consider things such as raising the age of eligibility or recalculating cost-of-living increases for these programs for the elderly. That’s short of saying “we should cut Social Security,” as Sanders put it, though Biden’s past comments have been criticized by some liberals who believe any cuts to the safety net programs are non-negotiable. Sanders views raising the age of eligibility as a cut.
That’s not what Biden is proposing now. In his 2020 bid, Biden has proposed a plan that would increase revenue for Social Security by eliminating the payroll tax cap and expand benefits for some of the oldest seniors.
“There will be no compromise on cutting Medicare and Social Security, period. That’s a promise,” Biden said at the 2020 Iowa Brown & Black Presidential Forum on Jan. 20, according to VICE News.
Sanders argues that position is at odds with Biden’s past positions. Biden has been in government a long time — he was elected to the Senate in 1972 — and so he has a long legislative record and numerous publicly documented positions on these programs. We’ll lay out some of those stances that the Sanders campaign has highlighted.
The Ryan Plan
At the center of the heated back and forth between the Sanders and Biden campaigns is a video posted on Twitter by Warren Gunnels, a senior adviser for the Sanders campaign, which purports to show Biden “supporting” the tax plan championed by former House Speaker Ryan. A Jan. 7 newsletter from the Sanders campaign also features a brief transcript of the video as one piece of evidence that Biden “for years has tried to slash Social Security and Medicare.”
At a campaign stop in Iowa on Jan. 18, Biden described the video as “doctored” and said the assertion that he supported Ryan’s tax plan was “a flat lie.”
To be clear, the video was not doctored in the sense that it was digitally altered. The argument is that his words were lifted out of context.
Here’s a fuller context of Biden’s comments in an April 18, 2018, speech at the Brookings Institution, with the part used in the video tweeted by Gunnels in bold.
Biden, April 18, 2018: Look what’s happened with the latest tax cut. Once again those at the very top get the biggest breaks and what do we have to show for it? Even our Republican friends are now beginning to admit there’s no evidence these tax cuts are being put to work in the economy. No new growth, just more debt.
And that puts middle class programs that they rely on and they’ve worked for at real risk.
Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code. What’s the first thing he decided we had to go after? Social Security and Medicare. Now, we need to do something about Social Security and Medicare. That’s the only way you can find room to pay for it.
Now, I don’t know a whole lot of people in the top one-tenth of 1% or the top 1% who are relying on Social Security when they retire. I don’t know a lot of them. Maybe you guys do. So we need a pro-growth, progressive tax code that treats workers as job creators, as well, not just investors, that gets rid of unprotective loopholes like stepped-up basis; and it raises enough revenue to make sure that the Social Security and Medicare can stay, it still needs adjustments, but can stay; and pay for the things we all acknowledge will grow the country.
“To hear Biden say ‘Ryan was correct’ to go after Social Security & Medicare is soul-wrenching,” Gunnels commented.
Listening to Biden’s words or reading them in that fuller context, however, suggests a different meaning. After saying, “What’s the first thing he decided we had to go after?” Biden leaned close to the microphone and said in an exaggerated, ominous voice, “Social Security and Medicare.”
Biden was talking about a need to change the tax code to “deal with income inequity” and that the tax changes championed by Ryan and Trump worsen the problem.
“It’s [the tax code] wildly skewed toward taking care of those at the very top. It favors, overwhelmingly favors, investors over workers and it’s riddled with unproductive expenditures,” Biden said.
In that context, we think a reasonable person would conclude that Biden was mocking Ryan’s plan, and that Biden was arguing Republicans would use it to justify cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
“The Sanders campaign pushed a video and transcript that were intentionally, deceptively edited to make it seem like Vice President Biden was praising and agreeing with Paul Ryan, when it is clear he was doing the exact opposite,” a Biden campaign official told us. “In the speech, Biden was reiterating his core belief that we need to undo Trump’s tax cuts for the super wealthy and replace them with a tax code that rewards work, not just wealth. He warned that Republicans like Paul Ryan would use their tax cuts, which added trillions to the deficit, to argue for cuts to Social Security and Medicare — the kind of cuts he believes we have to fight tooth and nail.”
We should note that Ryan, in early December 2017, when the Republican tax bill was being debated, claimed Republicans would not try to change Social Security as a result of the tax changes, though the Washington Post noted that some Republicans were open to cuts to either program for future (but not current) beneficiaries.
“You also have to bring spending under control. And not discretionary spending. That isn’t the driver of our debt. The driver of our debt is the structure of Social Security and Medicare for future beneficiaries,” said Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, also in December 2017.
Democrats’ fears were heightened by vague comments from Trump in an interview with CNBC from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, in which the president said that tackling spending on “entitlements” such as Social Security and Medicare was “the easiest of all things” and is something he planned to take up “toward the end of the year.” A White House spokesman later released a statement saying that the president was not suggesting “benefit cuts” but rather eliminating “waste” and “fraud,” the Washington Post reported.
To be clear, Biden did not support the Ryan/Trump tax cuts, and he has opposed a change to Social Security — as Ryan proposed in the past — that would have allowed limited, voluntary private accounts for workers age 55 and under.
But other comments Biden made in his Brookings speech left some wondering whether he was open to reductions to Medicare or Social Security spending. After making his comments about Ryan’s tax plan, Biden continued, “So we need a pro-growth, progressive tax code that treats workers as job creators, as well, not just investors; that gets rid of unprotective loopholes like stepped-up basis; and it raises enough revenue to make sure that the Social Security and Medicare can stay; it still needs adjustments, but can stay, and pay for the things we all acknowledge will grow the country.”
Biden’s comment that Social Security and Medicare “still needs adjustments” raised red flags for some Social Security and Medicare advocates.
In an article for truthdig, Alex Lawson, executive director of the liberal group Social Security Works, argued Biden’s language was political-speak for being “open to cutting Social Security benefits.”
