



Taking Away Your Benefits Puts A Big Smile on His Face



Rep. Paul Ryan, Commander-in-Chief of the Benefits Thieves, threw in the towel a week ago. He doesn’t see cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits in the near future. Which makes him so, so sad. But that news comes as a relief to the millions upon millions of Americans who paid for those benefits, who earned those benefits, who depend on those benefits, and who deserve to receive them. Let me explain … .



This year, 2013, was slated to be a very bad year for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid recipients. The House Republicans had lined up behind the Ryan Budget in 2011 and 2012. The Ryan Budget proposes to eliminate every Medicare guaranteed benefit (replacing them with a check that would fall $6000 short of paying for those benefits each year), and to eliminate every Medicaid guaranteed benefit (replacing them with fifty checks, one to each state, money that likely would never reach the poor and the sick). Paul Ryan also labeled Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”



And if that weren’t bad enough, the budget that the White House introduced earlier this year proposed one Social Security benefit cut and three Medicare benefit cuts. The White House’s “chained CPI” would reduce cost-of-living adjustments. The White House’s Medicare benefit cuts would promote “means-testing” of Medicare recipients, meaning that although virtually every worker in America (including the self-employed) pays into the program, only poor retirees would benefit from it fully.



Well, you and I and a whole lot of other people weren’t going to stand for that. I composed the Grayson-Takano letter to the President and House Speaker, promising to vote against any and every benefit cut in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And working together, we got almost 50 Members of Congress to sign that letter.



We also set up a petition against earned benefit cuts at No-Cuts.com. This is what it said:



“We Are Against Any and Every Cut to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Not today, not tomorrow, and not ever. No way, no how. Not on your life, and certainly not on mine. N-E-V-E-R.



Sincerely, The American People”



That petition garnered well over two million supporters. It was my pleasure – and, oh, it certainly was a pleasure – to deliver that petition to both the White House and the House Speaker.



And it worked! We turned the tide against benefit cuts. Rep. Paul Ryan conceded that on Fox News a week ago, when he was asked about the prospects for a “Grand Bargain” (more like a “Grand Betrayal”) to cut earned benefits: “I don’t think that with this President, or this Senate, we’re going to have something like that. That’s why I think we need to win a couple of elections.”



Win a couple of elections? By insisting on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts? Good luck with that.



So we’ve won. At least for now. But we have to remain vigilant, always prepared to do it all over again. As anti-slavery leader Wendell Phillips said 160 years ago, the eternal role of active citizens is “unintermitted Agitation.”



So thank you, fellow Agitator. You and I make a great team.



Courage,



Rep. Alan Grayson

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty ― power is ever stealing from the many to the few … . The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle … .”



- Wendell Phillips, Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (1853).