GOP’s new attack on Social Security: Yet another result of government for the 1 percent

Why is the GOP Congress immediately targeting Social Security? Because it's what their real constituents want

Elias Isquith

As I and many others wrote at the time, one of the few unifying characteristics of last year’s midterm elections was their paucity of greater meaning. Granted, that’s always the case with midterms, at least to some degree, when the literally hundreds of federal and state-level elections lack a presidential campaign around which to position themselves. But as I argued then and still believe today, the 2014 cycle was especially perfunctory, especially shambolic and especially tangential to the truly important issues facing the United States today. And voters seemed to agree — or at least that’s my explanation for why so few of them bothered to show up.

However, even if I still can’t quite tell you what 2014 was about, I can tell you one thing that it most certainly wasn’t about: a supposedly pressing need to make significant cuts to Social Security, which remains one of the precious few big government programs that still enjoys high levels of widespread, bipartisan support. That’s not to say Americans don’t support reforming Social Security, or that they’re not open to considering making some benefit cuts (primarily for the wealthy); they do and they are. But it is to say that no one could argue, at least not with a straight face, that cutting Social Security benefits was a major topic of the year’s many debates. And yet, according to two of the Senate’s most popular and influential liberals, that’s one of the very first things the new, GOP-controlled Congress is trying to do.