StickWithANose

If you’re wondering why President Obama is now adopting a policy position that candidate Obama rightly ridiculed John McCain for you need look no further than the Rubinites advising him. Obama’s supposed spending freeze is but the opening act for the headliner: making significant cuts to social security, medicare and medicaid. NYT

It is the growth in the so-called entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that is the major factor behind projections of unsustainably high deficits, because of rapidly rising health costs and an aging population.

But one administration official said that limiting the much smaller discretionary domestic budget would have symbolic value. That spending includes lawmakers’ earmarks for parochial projects, and only when the public believes such perceived waste is being wrung out will they be willing to consider reductions in popular entitlement programs, the official said.

I am afraid that the Obama administration is becoming nothing more than symbolism wrapped in Republican lite politics. First off, social security is just fine. Raise the cap on social security taxes and what little of problem there is would be resolved. The real problem is medicare/medicaid. However, the best way to address those structural problems is through health care reform, a prospect that now looks to be quite dead. Obama’s corporatist deals with Pharma and the insurance industry and his ceding of control over the health care reform process to the House of Lords doomed any possibility of real health care reform, so now he is adopting the Clinton model by listening to the same tools that advised Clinton after his own health care meltdown.

The lesson being: We can’t fix the structural problems facing our nation, so the costs of resolving our fiscal problems will come out of poor and working people’s asses.