Earlier this week the co-chairs of the Catfood Commission – Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson – published their “chairman’s mark,” a set of proposals laying out truly cruel and reckless cuts to a range of public programs. At the core were proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits, offered in order to pay for proposed cuts to corporate taxes and income taxes for the wealthy.<\/p>\n
There’s been a lot of public reaction against these insane proposals. But the bigger picture is that there has been a lot of effort and money expended in the last few years to convince Americans – and Congress – that there is some kind of crisis and that the only way to “save” Social Security and Medicare is to slash benefits. Even if the Catfood Commission recommendations go nowhere, we’ll keep hearing calls from the elite that we have to cut those benefits – even if it means we all eat catfood when we’re in our old age.<\/p>\n
We have to mobilize now<\/strong> to stop Congress from ever considering cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits. That’s why the Courage Campaign is organizing a public whip count<\/a> of the California House Delegation to demand they pledge to oppose any cuts to those programs. You can see the latest totals here<\/a>. Depending on the outcome, we’ll target our two Senators next.<\/p>\n It’s our hope that all 53 of California’s Representatives will stand with the people against destroying our economy and our future prosperity and reject these crazy cuts.<\/p>\n After all, Social Security itself began as a grassroots effort here in California, organized by Dr. Francis Townsend, a resident of Long Beach who in the early 1930s created a huge public movement to demand public old age pensions. Social Security was a bit less than what Townsend had wanted, but it was still a major success. Nearly 80 years later, it’s time for another grassroots movement to protect and expand Social Security, instead of destroying it to satisfy some wealthy elites.<\/p>\n Note: I am the Public Policy Director at the Courage Campaign<\/I><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier this week the co-chairs of the Catfood Commission – Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson – published their “chairman’s mark,” a set of proposals laying out truly cruel and reckless cuts to a range of public programs. At the core were proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits, offered in order to pay for proposed cuts to corporate taxes and income taxes for the wealthy.<\/p>\n There’s been a lot of public reaction against these insane proposals. But the bigger picture is that there has been a lot of effort and money expended in the last few years to convince Americans – and Congress – that there is some kind of crisis and that the only way to “save” Social Security and Medicare is to slash benefits. Even if the Catfood Commission recommendations go nowhere, we’ll keep hearing calls from the elite that we have to cut those benefits – even if it means we all eat catfood when we’re in our old age.<\/p>\n We have to mobilize now<\/strong> to stop Congress from ever considering cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits. That’s why the Courage Campaign is organizing a public whip count<\/a> of the California House Delegation to demand they pledge to oppose any cuts to those programs. You can see the latest totals here<\/a>. Depending on the outcome, we’ll target our two Senators next.<\/p>\n It’s our hope that all 53 of California’s Representatives will stand with the people against destroying our economy and our future prosperity and reject these crazy cuts.<\/p>\n After all, Social Security itself began as a grassroots effort here in California, organized by Dr. Francis Townsend, a resident of Long Beach who in the early 1930s created a huge public movement to demand public old age pensions. Social Security was a bit less than what Townsend had wanted, but it was still a major success. Nearly 80 years later, it’s time for another grassroots movement to protect and expand Social Security, instead of destroying it to satisfy some wealthy elites.<\/p>\n Note: I am the Public Policy Director at the Courage Campaign<\/I><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-3l9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}