According to a Reuters report, President Obama is using the worst fear mongering tactics to frighten seniors into pressing their Congressmen to vote for a $2.3 trillion rise in the debt ceiling. In an interview on Tuesday, Obama said that checks to recipients of Social Security may not go out in early August if he and the Republican congressional leaders do not agree on a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
"I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue," Obama said in an interview with CBS, according to a transcript on the network's web site. "Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it," Obama said.
In an Internet commentary on the president’s tactics, Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge, writes:
Is that so Mr. President? Please explain then how according to the most recent DTS the YTD (fiscal) amount paid out on Social Security is $469 billion, well below the amount collected from Federal Tax Deposits of $780 billion. As a comparison, this number is lower than the combination of Medicare and Medicaid ($638 billion YTD), and the combination of Defense and Education Payments ($480 billion). Indicatively, Federal salaries are a whopping $137.6 billion, or said otherwise, all of the SSN payments to date are just three times bigger than what the government pays its own employees.
As I explained in my earlier article on this subject, FICA taxes are able to cover Social Security Payments until 2017 before there is any need to use the treasury paper in the Social Security Trust Fund.
Obama’s aim is to pile more and more debt on the back of the American people so that they will never be able to get out from under except by default, which would destroy the “faith and full credit of the government.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has become more and more critical of how the Republcans are going about dealing with Obama. For example, he is highly critical of Paul Ryan and his plan to reform Medicare. Why bring up a subject that is bound to worry seniors about the payment of their medical bills just now?
Obamacare is stripping Medicare of $500 billion in order to pay for the Democrats’ socialized medicine. That should be enough to frighten seniors away from Obamacare. But Paul Ryan’s plan has simply given Democrats a sledge hammer to destroy all Republican efforts to make needed reforms by claiming that the Republicans want to push Grandma over a cliff.
What did the Republicans expect the Democrats to do with Ryan’s plan?
In other words, Trump is right. The Republicans are not using their heads to defeat the Democrats. They’re pretending that the Democrats are really nice guys who play fairly. Ryan is a newcomer to Washington. He is not familiar with the socialist thugs in Congress who will use any bald-face lie to defeat Republicans.
The Republican Tea Partiers claim that they want a smaller federal government but they have not yet put forth a list of departments and agencies that should be abolished. So instead of debating about the uselessness of the Department of Education, we are talking about Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. These entitlement programs for the elderly and the poor ought not to be discussed at this time. It only gives Democrats the ammunition they need to frighten Americans so that they will reelect Obama.
