GOP warm to Social Security & Medicare reform this election year - AMAC & Fox News
Call it political suicide or a refreshing breath of honesty. But with entitlement spending accounting for most of the federal budget, hiding from reality appears to be no longer an option. Elizabeth Elkind of Fox News quotes a number of GOP House members who say insolvency of both Social Security and Medicare is driving serious conversations for reform. Democrats are predictably saying Republicans are planning to gut entitlements. House Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) had this to say: “You cannot solve the U.S. deficit problem exclusively in the Appropriations Committee, as discretionary spending only amounts to roughly 28 percent of U.S. expenditures. If we are going to produce a balanced budget, which I strongly believe we should be striving to do, we should be having serious discussions on how to fund and reform our entitlement programs, which makes up approximately 60 percent of all spending.” Full article here.
As an example of the leading thoughts on reforming Social Security, the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC, Inc.) believes Social Security must be preserved and modernized. This can be achieved without tax increases by slight modifications to cost of living adjustments and payments to high income beneficiaries plus gradually increasing the full (but not early) retirement age. AMAC Action, AMAC’s advocacy arm, supports an increase in the threshold where benefits are taxed and then indexing for inflation, and calls for eliminating the reduction in people’s benefits for those choosing to work before full retirement age. AMAC is resolute in its mission that Social Security be preserved for current and successive generations and has gotten the attention of lawmakers in D.C., meeting with many congressional offices and staff over the past decade.