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Act Daily News
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President Joe Biden has gone on the assault over Social Security and Medicare.
In speeches and tweets this week, Biden and his White House have singled out specific Republican senators – notably together with Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin – over proposals from these senators that might have an effect on the retirement and well being care packages.
The Republican senators have responded forcefully, accusing Biden of deceiving the general public about the place they stand. Here is a fact-check of the exchanges.
Biden and his White House focused Lee on Wednesday over a video clip of Lee saying, “I’m here right now to tell you one thing that you probably have never heard from a politician. It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.” The clip has gone viral on Twitter this week; a second viral clip options Lee saying moments later, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort and need to be pulled up.”
The movies are genuine, although Biden didn’t inform his Wednesday speech viewers in Wisconsin they’re from greater than 12 years in the past – an occasion in 2010, when Lee was working for the Senate however earlier than he was first elected. And as Lee famous in Wednesday tweets responding to Biden, Biden didn’t point out that Lee added on the similar 2010 occasion that present Medicare beneficiaries ought to have their advantages “left untouched” and that “the next layer beneath them, those who will retire in the next few years, also probably have to be held harmless.”
Still, whereas Biden may have included extra context, he was correct in saying Lee had referred to as for Social Security to be phased out.
And whereas Lee mentioned in a tweeted assertion on Wednesday that, throughout his 12 years as a senator, he has not referred to as for “abolishing” Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid advantages, just for “solutions to improve those programs and move them toward solvency,” he has supported profit cuts. For instance, he has endorsed varied proposals over time to lift the Social Security retirement age.
Since final yr, Biden has criticized Scott over specific parts of what Scott calls his “12 Point Plan to Rescue America.”
In the State of the Union tackle on Tuesday and in speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, the president referred to part of Scott’s plan that claims, “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Biden accurately asserted that “all federal legislation” would come with Social Security and Medicare, which don’t at present require congressional re-approval.
Scott responded by accusing Biden of being dishonest and confused. Scott argued on Twitter on Wednesday that whereas his plan does say that “all” federal laws ought to sundown in 5 years and change into topic to a brand new vote by Congress, “This is clearly & obviously an idea aimed at dealing with ALL the crazy new laws our Congress has been passing of late.”
But the plan itself doesn’t say that.
The plan’s official textual content, which stays on-line on a devoted web site, says “all federal legislation,” interval, ought to be sundown in 5 years – not all current laws, all loopy laws or all laws aside from the legal guidelines that created Social Security and Medicare. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected Scott’s plan final yr, McConnell too mentioned that the plan “sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”
Last yr, Biden typically overstated the assist for Scott’s sundown proposal amongst congressional Republicans, which seems very restricted. Biden has been extra exact in his speeches this week, attributing the proposal to Scott himself or precisely saying within the State of the Union that “some” Republicans – “I’m not saying it’s a majority” – assist it.
Biden could have created an inaccurate impression, nonetheless, by mentioning the sundown proposal in the course of the part of the State of the Union wherein he mentioned the battle over the debt ceiling. There is not any indication that House Republicans are pushing this proposal as half of the present debt ceiling negotiations with the Biden administration, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, extra usually, mentioned cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in these negotiations.
Scott, in flip, has tossed a false declare into the controversy with Biden this week by repeatedly accusing the president of getting reduce billions from Medicare in final yr’s Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act didn’t reduce Medicare advantages; fairly, it allowed the federal government and seniors to spend much less cash to purchase pharmaceuticals – and, actually, concurrently made Medicare advantages extra beneficiant to seniors. The declare of a Medicare reduce was repeatedly debunked final yr, when Scott and a Republican marketing campaign group he chaired used it in the course of the midterm elections.
On Friday afternoon, the day after McConnell instructed a Kentucky radio station that Scott’s proposal will probably be a “challenge” for Scott’s personal 2024 re-election marketing campaign in a state with a big inhabitants of seniors, Scott introduced he’s introducing a brand new invoice that may make it harder for Congress to make any cuts to Social Security and Medicare and that may ship the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion in Internal Revenue Service funding to Social Security and Medicare as a substitute.
This week and in quite a few earlier speeches, Biden has castigated Johnson for saying final yr that Medicare and Social Security ought to be handled as discretionary spending, which Congress has to approve yearly, fairly than as everlasting entitlements.
Biden has precisely cited Johnson’s remarks this week. Here’s what Johnson instructed a Green Bay radio present in August: “We’ve got to turn everything into discretionary spending, so it’s all evaluated, so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt. Because, again, as long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.” When Johnson confronted criticism for these remarks on the time, he stood by them and mentioned that was his constant longtime place.
Johnson, nonetheless, claimed Wednesday that Biden was “lying” when the president mentioned Johnson’s feedback shortly after saying that some Republicans wish to “cut” Social Security. Johnson has repeatedly mentioned that his proposal to require annual approval for Social Security spending, and to “fix” and “save” Social Security in gentle of its poor fiscal form at current, doesn’t imply that he needs to place the packages on the “chopping block” and even to “cut” it.
“The Democrats have been accusing me, since the first time I ran for office, of wanting to end Social Security, wanting to cut it, wanting to gut it, wanting to – I’ve never said that. I’ve always been consistent: I want to save it,” he mentioned in a radio interview this week.
It’s unimaginable to definitively fact-check this specific dispute with out Johnson specifying how he needs to “fix” and “save” this system. His workplace didn’t reply to a Act Daily News request for remark.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates famous in an e mail to reporters on Thursday that, although Johnson accused Biden this week of mendacity about his stance on Social Security, Johnson additionally mentioned in interviews this week that Social Security is a “legal Ponzi scheme” and that “Social Security might be in a more stable position for younger workers” if the federal government had proceeded with Republican President George W. Bush’s controversial and finally deserted proposal within the mid-2000s to permit employees born after 1949 to divert a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into non-public accounts wherein they might purchase into the inventory market and make different investments.
Source: www.cnn.com