Right-Wing Attack on Social Security Tries to Convince Us That Retirees Are Better off Than We Imagine 9JAN16

 
 Photo Credit: Image by Shutterstock, Copyright (c) Rayjunk
MORE on the campaign of fraud, lies, manipulation and deception by the 2016 repiglican presidential candidates on the state of the Social Security program and the need to expand benefits and raise the taxable income limit. jeb bush, chris christie, marco rubio and ted cruz all want to raise the retirement age, and they have plans for cutting benefits and or privatizing Social Security, destroying the tax funded program that is in the black now, for the foreseeable future and can afford to increase benefits. The income ceiling on Social Security taxes must be raised from $118,500 to at least $250,000, should be $500,000. Both hillary clinton and Sen Bernie Sanders
agree on the need raise the taxable ceiling and to expand benefits, BERNIE 2016 wants the expansion of benefits across the board, hillary would limit it. Bottom line is, the repiglicans want to take more from the poor, working class, middle class,  the retired and disabled and give it to the 1%. Bernie Sanders plans to increase Social Security taxes on those who can afford it and and use the increased revenue, along with securing the Social Security trust fund from being pillaged by the federal government, to increase and expand benefits. Comfort or poverty, who you support and vote for will determine the economic state of your retirement. Your future really is in your hands. From +AlterNet ......

Right-Wing Attack on Social Security Tries to Convince Us That Retirees Are Better off Than We Imagine

Ridiculous rhetoric meets Congress' fuzzy math.

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet

January 9, 2016

Photo Credit: Image by Shutterstock, Copyright (c) Rayjunk

The right-wing war against Social Security has taken a turn into new heights of hyperbole and arrogance.

For years, you may recall, the anti-Social Security crowd said Americans could do better with investing their own money on Wall Street, essentially privatizing the most successful and popular government program. Then they said seniors were stealing money from younger generations, never mentioning that the funds came from their lifetime of work. Then last year they said that disabled people were just pretending to be injured and defrauding the government. Now there is an even more outrageous and baseless claim.
“They’re telling people they have more money than they say they do,” said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, which has documented and burgeoning retirement security crisis and advocates for increased benefits.
The latest example of this we-know-your-wallet-better-than-you ruse has been a series of commentaries in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Forbes by Andrew Biggs, a “resident scholar” at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who was a deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration under President George W. Bush (who repeatedly tried but failed to privatize Social Security).
“One persistent feature of the conservative attack on Social Security, and especially on the emerging campaign to increase benefits, is the notion that the typical American will do just fine in retirement just as it is,” wrote Michael Hiltzik, the Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer-Prize winning business writer, summarizing this dubious line of attack as exemplified by Bigg’s Wall Street Journal piece, “New Evidence on the Phony Retirement Security Crisis.”
Bigg relies on an old Washington trick—the introduction of a new economic metric by congressional researchers that support a predetermined conclusion that ignores the reality faced by tens of millions of Americans. In this instance, it’s a new formula for calculating what’s called the “replacement rate,” or what percentage of one’s pre-retirement income will be dispensed in Social Security benefits. Economists typically say about 70 percent of one’s income is needed, of which Social Security is supposed to be one source.
“A typical middle-income individual born in the 1960s and retiring in the 2020s will be eligible for a Social Security benefit equal to 56 percent of his late-in-life earnings,” Biggs cheerily declares in the Wall Street Journal. “The CBO’s [Congressional Budget Office] Social Security figures, taken together with rising individual retirement savings, undercut the often-voiced claim that Americans face a ‘retirement crisis’ that only an expanded Social Security program can fix.”
The facts, as economists and economics writers have pointed out, are not with Biggs.
“If we step back from replacement rates, we can ask a rhetorical question, is $19,000 a year a middle-class income?” blogged economist Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director, in response to Biggs’ claims. “Odds are that most people would not consider $19,000 a reasonable income for a middle-class household, hence the basis for the claim about a retirement crisis.”
Baker punctured another assertion.
“Biggs does point to the record amount of retirement savings,” Baker said. “This is indeed good news for those who have these savings, but unfortunately most middle class households don’t fall into this category. According to the Federal Reserve Board’s 2013 Survey of Consumer Finance, the average net worth outside of housing equity for the middle quintile of households between the ages of 55 and 64 was less than $55,000. This includes all IRAs, 401(k)s and other retirement accounts. This will translate into roughly $3,000 a year in additional retirement income, bringing this middle income household’s income up to $22,000 a year.”
What’s happening is right-wingers in the think tank community in Washington, D.C., in the majority on Capital Hill and on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, are seeing that Democrats are making headway with voters about the need to increase social safety net benefits. As the LA Times’ Hiltzik noted, when Biggs argued in the Washington Post that Americans’ IRAs and 401(k) balances have grown by nearly 50 percent from 1996 to early 2015, he mistakenly “assumes that retirement assets are distributed among the population in the same proportion as working income.”
“Is that plausible?” Hiltzik continued. “Doubtful, because facts tell a different story. Wealth inequality is spreading through the economy, and the gap in retirement assets may be even wider. Enrollment in 401(k) plans and other retirement accounts rises sharply with income… The likelihood is that the shortfall in retirement assets is going to become grimmer with time.”
The New York Times’ editorial board amplified that same conclusion last Sunday, noting that “36 percent of retirees now rely on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income… 65 percent of retirees rely on it for more than half of their income.” Average monthly benefits are about $1,300. As far as the purported growing savings plans of soon-to-be seniors, the Times said that fewer employees even have that option. Only 44 percent of workers “on the lower half of the income scale” had retirement plans at work in 2013, compared to 54 percent in 1995, they noted. When gender and race are factored in, women—especially women of color—are particularly vulnerable.
“In the Uberized ‘gig economy,’ fewer workers may even have an employer to offer them,” Hiltzik wrote. Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute’s Monique Morrissey and Ross Eisenbrey write that the U.S. has more people age 60 and older working than many European countries because they essentially can’t afford to stop working.
But back to the latest fuzzy math from odd government formulas used to frame the Social Security debate and determine what benefits will actually be. As anyone who is receiving Social Security benefits will tell you, this new CBO formula is not the first weird metric they’ve recently seen. Because of the unealistic way that the government calculates cost-of-living increases for Social Security, recipients in 2016 will not see any change in the monthly benefits from 2015. This is happening even as the prices of prescription drugs significantly increased last year, including generics which jumped 11 percent.
“Skyrocketing drug prices with no COLA [cost of living adjustment] is a huge benefit cut,” said Social Security Works’ Lawson.
Meanwhile, on the 2016 campaign trail, several Republican contenders—Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio—want to increase the age when people can collect benefits to save money, even though that would hit lower-wage workers the hardest. All except for Rubio would reduce future cost-of-living adjustments, and Bush and Cruz would revive George W. Bush’s privatization scheme.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would raise the income tax ceiling that’s currently taxed for Social Security—it now is the first $118,500 of payroll income—and raise benefits. Clinton said widows and caregivers should see the biggest increases. Sanders would raise them across the board.
But the newest twist in the ongoing fight about Social Security is the arrogant and plainly incorrect assertion by right-wingers that aging Americans have more money than they think they do—and thus there’s no need to increase government-managed retirement benefits, but, if anything, to cut them instead.

The President's Social Security Plan Is a Really, Really Bad Idea & THE CHAINED CPI: A PAINFUL CUT IN SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS AND A STEALTH TAX HIKE 11APR13&DEZ 2012

PRES Obama and officials from his administration continue to lie to the American people concerning Social Security, the program's viability, and the non-existent relationship between the federal debt and federal deficit and Social Security. His crass campaign is morally repugnant and puts him on par with the gop and tea-baggers in Congress, resorting to deception, manipulation, misrepresentation, fueling fear of economic hardship to achieve his political agenda of protecting the wealth and power of the rich and corporate America. President Obama was reelected with a mandate from the people to end the class warfare on the 99% and restore the social contract of the nation. Sadly, we are just now finding out how morally weak he is, that he too has been bankrupted by the politics of Washington, bought out by those with the money to buy even our highest elected officials to get their way. We do not have to support him, to "have his back" as the   e mails from the White House and Democratic organizations request. He has turned his back on us. As I have posted before, Democracy is not a spectator sport. To protect Social Security, defeat chained cpi and protect the integrity of Medicare and Medicaid we need to contact our Representative http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ and Senators http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm and demand they vote against any and all legislation containing chained cpi and cutting the funding and benefits of Medicare and Medicaid. From HuffPost....

Yesterday, the president released his 2014 budgetand, among some solid line items like additional infrastructure spending, universal preschool and reductions in tax breaks for Big Oil, he also proposed the truly stupid idea of linking Social Security cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs) to something called "chained CPI" (chained consumer price index).

Briefly put, Social Security benefits are routinely hiked by a few percentage points each year based on inflation. Lately, those bumps have been scarce and more than a little weak, but adjustments based on chained CPI would be even weaker because the government would presume that as retail prices increase with inflation seniors will substitute lower-cost items. In other words, the government currently calculates benefits based on inflation, but with chained CPI, the government would calculate benefits based on an assumed consumerreaction to inflation (buying cheaper stuff). Consequently, Social Security benefits would be reduced to follow this assumption.

Yeah, it sucks. And the president, while attempting to play the role of the grown-up in the room and apparently taking responsible steps toward deficit reduction and Social Security salvation, is only managing to wrap his entire presidency around the big political third rail. It's not as huge as George W. Bush's second-term embrace of Social Security tinkering, but it's a bad move.

Not only is the idea a punitive one for seniors, but the president is also fueling a series of inside-D.C. myths. They are:

1) Social Security is broke! IEEE! This might, in fact, be biggest D.C. myth of all D.C. myths. It originated with Republican concern trolls who pretend to care about Social Security but, in reality, are trying to kill it. The strategy is to weaken it to the point of being unpopular and unsalvageable -- ripe for a private takeover or total shutdown. And so we get this on-going panic-button freakout that echoes through the complacent false equivalence press corp, and is ultimately fueled by Democrats like the president. But according to the Social Security trustees, the program will be capable of paying full benefits based on the current COLA formula for the next 20 years. Actually, the outlook is even better than that: the trustees also reported that Social Security will run asurplus until 2033. Can you imagine if any program in the federal government was projected to run a surplus for even half of that time? Budget hawks would crap their cages demanding immediate action to give back the taxpayers' money by slashing the program to the line. Furthermore, once 2033 rolls around, Social Security will be capable of paying 75 to 80 percent of total benefits in 2033 money, which, accounting for inflation, is more than Social Security recipients receive today.

2) We have to tinker with Social Security because of the deficit. Whenever deficit hawks suffer from one of these routine fits of apoplexy, they always manage to loop Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts into the mix, along with cuts to minor spending areas like foreign aid. Put another way, a gaggle of super-wealthy politicians and pundits who will never really need Social Security are always way, way, waaaay too eager to dump these programs onto the chopping block. In a budget crisis that's ginned up by multi-millionaires, we should demand that they get in line first -- cut programs and spending on areas that effect the wealthiest Americans, including corporations, before anyone else is forced to pitch in.

3) We have to cut the deficit or else! Total nonsense. The deficit has dropped by nearly 48 percent(as a percentage of GDP). From the high water mark of $1.4 trillion in 2009, the deficit has steadily decreased to a projected $845 billion by the end of this year. The CBO projects that by the end of 2016, the deficit will have dropped to $433 billion, for a total of nearly a trillion dollars in deficit reduction in six years. But the economic recovery is still slow. Now isn't the time to be making further drastic cuts in government spending, and by continuing to talk about deficit reduction, the president only amplifies the false perception that the deficit is growing -- along with all of the usual idiotic conflation of the deficit and the national debt.

4) Raising the payroll tax rate or lifting the income cap is out of the question! The president is already widely accused of being a big tax-hiker by Republican opponents, so another two or three percent hike in the payroll tax (the FICA tax found on your paycheck stub) probably wouldn't make much of a difference on that front, nor would proposing that the income cap on the payroll tax rise from $113,000 to, say, $200,000 or higher. But I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone from the White House even hint at floating such a plan. Personally, I would entirely eliminate the income cap, which would allow Social Security to pay full benefits until 2087, but I'm clearly a tax-loving Euro-socialist. You know, like Ronald Reagan:

In 1983, for example, [Reagan] signed off on Social Security reform legislation that, among other things, accelerated an increase in the payroll tax rate, required that higher-income beneficiaries pay income tax on part of their benefits, and required the self-employed to pay the full payroll tax rate, rather than just the portion normally paid by employees.

Obviously in today's political climate, Reagan would've failed.

But here's the good news. Naturally we ought to keep a close eye on anyone who meddles with the program, but I seriously doubt the chained CPI proposal will pass. Any real plan to reinforce the stability of Social Security will happen gradually, imperceptibly and in private without a lot of hoopla. That's the reality of Social Security sausage-making. It's the way it's always been because the alternative is to commit political suicide -- the most recent example was Bush's disastrous privatization scheme in 2005.

So why not go for a plan like the one I outlined in item #4, or -- shocker -- the Reagan plan instead of floating this weird, jargony concept that's already been tagged as a benefit cut, the worst of all solutions? It's baffling, and it's impossible to defend the president on this one. Any upside, real or unreal, of being viewed as "the grownup in the room" will be far outweighed by supporting a cut in Social Security benefits. And now when Future Republican President X wants to slash benefits, he or she only needs to point to the prior endorsement of President Obama. Sadly, and irrespective of any political chess gambit he's setting up, he's contributing to this nefarious Social Security "insolvency" panic-mongering: a total myth and perhaps the biggest lie being foisted upon the American people today.

Cross-posted at The Daily Banter.
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Issue Brief December 2012
* Alan Barber is the Domestic Communications Director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in
Washington, D.C. Nicole Woo is Director of Domestic Policy at CEPR.

The Chained CPI: A Painful Cut in Social Security Benefits and a Stealth Tax Hike
In the debate over federal budget deficits, several politicians have proposed to change the formulas that determine benefit levels for Social Security and other government programs as well as income tax brackets. Switching to a relatively new formula, the Chained CPI, would help the federal government save money by slowing increases in benefits and raising additional tax revenue.
Proponents of this proposal argue that the Chained CPI is a more accurate formula and any impact on beneficiaries of the government programs affected would be mitigated by increased tax revenue from the wealthy. However, research and data effectively refute those arguments by showing that:
1) Switching to the Chained CPI would result in cuts to already modest Social Security benefits.
2) It is likely that the Chained CPI is not an accurate measure of the inflation rate seen by seniors.
3) The Chained CPI would lead to income tax increases for working Americans.
Measuring Inflation
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates the consumer price indexes (CPIs) to gauge inflation by measuring changes in the prices of goods and services that Americans purchase each month. In addition to being the basis for annual adjustments in benefits for government programs, changes in income tax brackets and deductions are also pegged to CPIs. Different indexes are used for different purposes. The CPI-U is used for income tax bracket calculation, while the CPI-W has been used to determine the yearly change in benefits for Social Security to keep pace with inflation since 1975.1
Some policy makers now want to change to the Chained CPI, which shows a lower rate of inflation than the currently-used CPIs. This index measures the price of a basket of goods that changes in response to the relative price shifts of different goods as opposed to the CPIs, which remain fixed over time. An example of this would be a rise in the price of chicken leading people to buy less chicken and more cheese. The Chained CPI would then place a higher weight on the cheese component of its index and a lower weight on the chicken component. In essence, it substitutes in items with less rapid increases in price for items that have more rapid rises in price thereby causing it show a lower overall rate of inflation.
The Chained CPI Would Result in Benefit Cuts for Retirees and Other Vulnerable
Americans
Social Security benefits are already quite modest. In 2012, the average annual benefit for
beneficiaries aged 65 and older was less than $15,000.2 Any additional reduction of benefits would
have serious repercussions for retirees, 2-out-of-5 of whom rely on Social Security for 90 percent of
their retirement income.
The Chained CPI is relatively new and has only been calculated by the BLS since 2002. It has shown
a rate of inflation 0.3 percent lower than the current index used to calculate Social Security’s annual
cost-of-living adjustment. Over time, changing to the Chained CPI would result in significant cuts to
Social Security benefits: a cut of roughly 3 percent after 10 years, about 6 percent after 20 years, and
close to 9 percent after 30 years. In addition, lower-income retirees would lose much larger
proportions of their income than wealthy ones.3
As shown in Figure 1, if the switch to the Chained CPI had been made in 2001, the reduction in
benefits would have effectively wiped out the entire 2012 Social Security cost-of-living adjustment.4
Switching to the Chained CPI immediately would have a more significant impact on the retirement
income of seniors than the ending the Bush-era tax cuts would have on the after-tax income of the
wealthiest 2 percent of households. For the average worker retiring at age 65, this would mean a cut
of about $650 each year by age 75 and a cut of roughly $1,130 each year at age 85.5 These reductions
in benefits would be a substantial hardship for millions of retired and disabled Americans.
Switching to the Chained CPI would also directly affect many other vulnerable Americans. Many federal assistance programs rely on the CPI to determine eligibility for benefits. Just as the elderly would see their benefits cut by shifting to the Chained CPI, so would veterans, low-income children, the disabled, and others who are more likely to rely on government programs.
Accurately Calculating Cost-of-Living Adjustments for the Elderly
It is important to note that while some claim the Chained CPI more accurately calculates inflation, this is likely not the case for seniors, who would be directly affected by using the Chained CPI to calculate Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustments. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that seniors spend proportionally more of their income on medical care and housing, which in addition to rising more rapidly than most other costs, are also much harder to substitute with other products. This research suggests that a CPI based on living costs of the elderly would actually show a higher, not lower, rate of inflation. The BLS has constructed an experimental elderly index (CPI-E) that takes these factors into account, and it shows a rate of inflation that averages 0.3 percentage points higher than the CPI currently in use.6
In addition, there are fewer opportunities for substitution in these areas of consumption. Also, because the elderly are a less mobile population, they may find it more difficult to change their consumption patterns. If accuracy is the main concern to be addressed by altering the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment, then the BLS could construct a full elderly index that more accurately tracks the consumption patterns of the elderly. There is no basis for assuming that a Chained CPI more accurately measures the rate of inflation experienced by the elderly than the current measure, however there is no doubt that it will lead to a reduction in benefits.
Some proponents of the Chained CPI argue that workers would respond to a reduction in Social Security benefits either by working later into life or saving more for retirement. In fact, in the 1990s there were a series of methodological changes to the CPI that reduced the measured rate of annual inflation by 0.5-0.7 percentage points. If the workers responded as argued, we would expect that non-Social Security income would be a larger portion of total income for beneficiaries in their mid-70s now (and therefore would have mostly been receiving the lower cost-of-living adjustment for a decade) than before the CPI was changed. However, the data shows the opposite: the share of Social Security in retirement income increased rather than decreased in the vast majority of cases.7 This indicates that most workers did not save more to make up for lower Social Security benefits in order to counteract the CPI reduction. This is further proof that switching to the Chained CPI would lead to lower retirement incomes for elderly Americans.
This is of particular note as the rise in the retirement age has already resulted in a decrease in benefits relative to lifetime earnings. The full-benefits retirement age increased from 65 to 66 between 2003 and 2008, and it is scheduled to rise further to 67 from 2017 to 2022. These retirement age increases are cuts in benefits, since beneficiaries have to work more years before receiving them. Early retirees who begin collecting benefits at 62 between the years 2005-2016 are already seeing a decrease in benefits relative to lifetime earnings of 5 percentage points. For those retiring at 62 after 2022, when the retirement age reaches 67, the decrease in benefits will be 10 percentage points. Figure 2, below, illustrates the benefit cuts for these retirees as a result of the prior CPI changes and the scheduled increases in the eligibility age for full benefits.8 Adopting the Chained CPI would mean additional benefit cuts, further eroding the retirement security of Social Security beneficiaries.
A Stealth Tax Increase on the Middle Class
The Chained CPI would also effectively raise taxes on virtually all working Americans, especially middle and lower income families. By applying it to all government programs, including the annual adjustment in income tax brackets, the Chained CPI would cause those thresholds to rise more slowly than they do now. That would lead to incomes jumping up to higher tax brackets faster, or in other words, income tax increases.
According to Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, if individual income taxes were indexed to the Chained CPI starting in January 2013, by 2021, 69 percent of the gains in revenue would come from taxpayers with incomes below $100,000, while those in the highest income brackets would barely be affected. For example, workers with incomes between $10,000 and $20,000 would experience an increased tax burden of 14.5 percent, while those with incomes over $1,000,000 would just see an increase of 0.1 percent. 9 This contradicts the idea that the negative effects from benefit cuts due to a switch to the Chained CPI would be offset by increased revenue from the wealthy.
1 Social Security is indexed to the CPI-W (an index that tracks the consumption patterns of wage and clerical workers), while tax brackets and most other programs are indexed to the CPI-U (an index that tracks the consumption patterns of all urban households).
2 Social Security Administration. 2012. “Monthly Statistical Snapshot, October 2012. ”http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot
3 Baker, Dean and David Rosnick. 2010 “The Impact of Social Security Cuts on Retiree Income.” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-impact-of-social-security-cuts-on-retiree-income
4 CEPR Graphic Economics. 2011. “Eleven Years Under Chained CPI Would Effectively Wipe Out the 2012 COLA.” October 19. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/graphic-economics/graphic-economics/eleven-years-under-chained-cpi-would-effectively-wipe-out-the-2012-cola
5 Calculations based on 2012 Trustees report (http://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/2012/index.html) if change is made from CPI-U to Chained CPI in January of 2013.
6 Stewart, Kenneth J. and Joseph Pavalone. 1996. “Attachment F: Experimental CPI for Americans 62 Years of Age and Older.” Washington, DC: Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.br12396.a06.htm
7 Baker, Dean and David Rosnick. 2011. “The Impact of Cutting Social Security Cost of Living Adjustments on the Living Standards of the Elderly.” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/impact-of-cutting-ss-cola-on-living-standards-of-elderly
8 Ibid.
9 Barthold, Thomas A. 2011. “Memorandum: Revenue Estimate and Distributional Analysis.” Congress of the United States, Joint Committee on Taxation. June 29. http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/sites/democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/files/media/pdf/112/6-29ResponseChainedCPI.pdf
http://www.scribd.com/doc/116575690/The-Chained-CPI-A-Painful-Cut-in-Social-Security-Benefits-and-a-Stealth-Tax-Hike

Obama Campaign Does Debate Cleanup On Social Security Answer 6OKT12

IT is bad enough mitt robme romney and lyin' paul ryan are intent on destroying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but Pres Obama's comment about there being little difference between them on Social Security set off warning bells for Progressives who are committed to protecting and saving these programs. Here is some damage control from the Obama campaign. We Progressives will continue to support your reelection, but we also put you on notice, KEEP YOUR BUDGET CUTTING KNIVES AWAY FROM SOCIAL SECURITY, MEDICARE AND MEDICAID.
WASHINGTON -- The Obama campaign played a bit of debate cleanup on Friday night with a blog post clarifying that there are, indeed, differences between the president's and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's approaches to Social Security.
The post on Obama's reelection campaign site comes on the heels of Wednesday night's debate, during which the president said he didn't think that he and Romney differed on reforming the entitlement program. It also follows comments from President Barack Obama's campaign senior adviser David Axelrod -- made the day after the debate -- expressing unawareness of Romney's position on Social Security (Axelrod went after vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's plan instead).
Progressive activists and even some top Democrats called the whole approach inexplicable. Romney offered some explicit plans to reform Social Security in his book and they were quite different from Obama's. Moreover, the decision to not use the issue as a political cudgel in such a highly watched moment -- indeed, to suggest it wasn't a campaign issue at all -- seemed like a major misstep.
And so, on Friday night, the clarification process began.
"While President Obama is committed to keeping the promise of guaranteed Social Security benefits for current and future generations, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have supported plans to privatize the program, and have put forward a plan that would slash benefits for current workers," the blog post read.
The post goes on to highlight "key differences between the president’s and Romney-Ryan’s approach to Social Security." Among them is a firm opposition, on the president's part, to any reforms that would privatize the program or "slash benefits for future generations." Romney, by contrast, has expressed support for optional individual retirement accounts and raising the retirement age.
"The choice is clear: President Obama will never privatize Social Security or undermine retirement security for middle-class Americans," the post concludes. "The same cannot be said for Romney."

Maybe so, but there are complicating factors here. For one, Obama did agree to change the payment rate of benefits as part of a debt-ceiling deal that he and House Speaker John Boehner nearly pulled off in August 2011. And while his campaign insists that he won't "slash" benefits, progressive reform advocates recoil at such language, arguing that it paves the way for him to back "modest" cuts. During an MSNBC interview several weeks ago, those concerns were exacerbated after Axelrod declined to detail what type of reforms Obama would pursue if reelected -- something that the Romney campaign highlighted on Saturday morning.
“Last night, the Obama campaign took its fact-checking campaign to a new height of absurdity, blaming confusion over the choice on Social Security reform on Mitt Romney," said Amanda Henneberg, a Romney campaign spokesperson. "But the truth is that if President Obama has a plan to save Social Security, he hasn’t shared it with anyone."
Policies aside, the politics are complicated too. Clearly the Obama campaign thinks it missed an opportunity during Wednesday night's debate to elucidate the differences between the two candidates on Social Security. But it's still unclear why the campaign didn't do it the next day. Indeed, waiting until Friday night to offer pushback means even fewer people will know or hear about it.
Democrats may end up relieved by the post, but they will likely want to see the president or Vice President Joe Biden make an issue of it during the subsequent debates.
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12 Things You Should Know About Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan 11AUG12

paul ryan r WI and mitt romney's pick for his running mate is like Dr Evil's minni-me, but there is nothing to laugh about if you understand the threat this team presents to the middle class, the working class, the working poor, the retired, disabled, women, students, Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid. A primer from Think Progress....

Mitt Romney has picked as his running mate 42 year-old Republican Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the architect of the GOP budget, which the New York Times has described as “the most extreme budget plan passed by a house of Congress in modern times.” Below are 12 things you should know about Ryan and his policies:
1. Embraces extreme individualism. Ryan heaped praise on Ayn Rand, a 20th-century libertarian novelist best known for her philosophy that centered on the idea that selfishness is “virtue.” Rand described altruism as “evil,” condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor, viewed the feminist movement as “phony,” and called Arabs “almost totally primitive savages. Though he publicly rejected “her philosophy” in 2012, Ryan had professed himself a strong devotee. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said at a D.C. gathering honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.” Learn more about Ryan’s muse:

2. Raises taxes on the middle class, cuts them for millionaires. Paul Ryan’s infamous budget — which Romney embraced — replaces “the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.” Federal tax collections would fall “by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade” as a result and to avoid increasing the national debt, the budget proposes massive cuts in social programs and “special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.” But 62 percent of the savings would come from programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes, who would also experience a tax increase. That’s because while Ryan “would extend the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year, he would not extend President Obama’s tax cuts for those with the lowest incomes, which will expire at the same time.” Households “earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.”
Audiences have booed Ryan for the unfair distribution:

3. Dramatically increases Medicare costs for seniors, increases eligibility age. Ryan’s latest budget transforms the existing version of Medicare, in which government provides seniors with a guaranteed benefit, into a “premium support” system. All future retirees would receive a government contribution to purchase insurance from an exchange of private plans or traditional fee-for-service Medicare. But since the premium support voucher does not keep up with increasing health care costs, the Congressional Budget Offices estimates that new beneficiaries could pay up to $1,200 more by 2030 and more than $5,900 more by 2050. A recent study also found that had the plan been implemented in 2009, 24 million beneficiares enrolled in the program would have paid higher premiums to maintain their choice of plan and doctors. Ryan would also raise Medicare’s age of eligibility to 67.
4. Leaves Social Security to the whims of Wall Street. In September of 2011, Ryan agreed with Rick Perry’s characterization of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and since 2005 has advocated for privatizing the retirement benefit and investing it in stocks and bonds. Conservatives claim that this would “outperform the current formula based on wages earned and overall wage appreciation,” but the economic crisis of 2008 should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers who seek to hinge Americans’ retirement on the stock market. In fact, “a person with a private Social Security account similar to what President George W. Bush proposed in 2005″ would have lost much of their retirement savings.
5. Budget would result in 4.1 million lost jobs in 2 years. Ryan’s budget calls for massive reductions in government spending. He has proposed cutting discretionary programs by about $120 billion over the next two years and mandatory programs by $284 billion, which, the Economic Policy Institute estimates, would suck demand out of the economy and “reduce employment by 1.3 million jobs in fiscal 2013 and 2.8 million jobs in fiscal 2014, relative to current budget policies.”
6. Eliminates Pell Grants for more more than 1 million students. Ryan’s budget claims both that rising financial aid is driving college tuition costs upward, and that Pell Grants, which help cover tuition costs for low-income Americans, don’t go to the “truly needy.” So he cuts the Pell Grant program by $200 billion, which could “ultimately knock more than one million students off” the program over the next 10 years.
7. Keeps $40 billion in subsidies for Big Oil. In 2011, Ryan joined all House Republicans and 13 Democrats in his vote to keep Big Oil tax loopholes as part of the FY 2011 spending bill. His budget would retain a decade’s worth of oil tax breaks worth $40 billion, while cutting “billions of dollars from investments to develop alternative fuels and clean energy technologies that would serve as substitutes for oil.” For instance, it “calls for a $3 billion cut in energy programs in FY 2013 alone” and would spend only $150 million over five years — or 20 percent of what was invested in 2012 — on energy programs.
8. Family stands to benefit from oil subsidies. Ryan “and his wife, Janna, own stakes in four family companies that lease land in Texas and Oklahoma to the very energy companies that benefit from the tax subsidies in Ryan’s budget plan,” the Daily Beast reported in June of 2011. “Ryan’s father-in-law, Daniel Little, who runs the companies, told Newsweek and The Daily Beast that the family companies are currently leasing the land for mining and drilling to energy giants such as Chesapeake Energy, Devon, and XTO Energy, a recently acquired subsidiary of ExxonMobil.”
9. Claimed Romneycare has led to “rationing and benefit cuts.” “I’m not a fan of [Romney's health care reform] system,” Ryan told C-SPAN in 2010. He argued that government is rationing care in the state and claimed that people are “seeing the system bursting by the seams, they’re seeing premium increases, rationing and benefit cuts.” He called the system “a fatal conceit” and “unsustainable.” Watch it:

10. Believes that Romneycare is “not that dissimilar to Obamacare.” Though Romney has gone to great lengths to distinguish his Massachusetts health care law from Obamacare, Romney doesn’t see the difference. “It’s not that dissimilar to Obamacare, and you probably know I’m not a big fan of Obamacare,” Ryan said at a breakfast meeting sponsored by the American Spectator in March of 2011. “I just don’t think the mandates work … all the regulation they’ve put on it…I think it’s beginning to death spiral. They’re beginning to have to look at rationing decisions.”
11. Accused generals of lying about their support for Obama’s military budget. In March, Ryan couldn’t believe that Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey supports Obama’s Pentagon budget, which incorporates $487 billion in cuts over 10 years. “We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice,” Ryan said at a policy summit hosted by the National Journal. “We don’t think the generals believe that their budget is really the right budget.” He later apologized for the implication. Watch it:

12. Co-sponsored a personhood amendment. Ryan joined 62 other Republicans in co-sponsoring the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which declares that a fertilized egg “shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” This would outlaw abortion, some forms of contraception and invitro fertilization.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/08/11/677171/12-things-you-should-know-about-vice-presidential-candidate-paul-ryan/?mobile=nc