"You can't call yourself a Democrat and support Social Security benefit cuts"

[JDPriestly]

30. Yes. They are saying that the Obama proposal would increase

the benefits for those who paid less into the system and lower them for others. That's another strike at the middle class.

But more importantly, it seems to me that with that turn of hand, paying more to the lowest paid recipients and less to the higher paid recipients of Social Security they are achieving two wrongs.

First, they are changing the nature of Social Security to make it means-tested. Someone like you who paid into the system will not receive quite as much as you would otherwise, and someone who did not pay in very much will receive more. That's fine, except basing the benefits according to the need is not Social Security.

Second, what they would be doing eliminating the need for things like food stamps, subsidized meals, etc. for seniors. I'm all for that. I think that is great. But I do not like the way they would do that. Currently, the funds for things like food stamps for the poor are paid out of general funds. If they raise the lowest Social Security benefits that is great for the country and for the poor recipients of Social Security, but it will deplete the Social Security Trust Fund faster. That is because at this time the money for the food stamps, etc. comes from the general fund. They are pulling a fast one by transferring the cost of providing for poor seniors totally to Social Security and not paying the costs out of the general fund.

The goal is a Wall Street goal and that is to get the middle class savers to spend all their money to fund their retirement and end up penniless at the end of their lives.

Also, this system will mean that very elderly people will receive more means-tested services such as for nursing homes, etc.

And middle-class seniors, especially lower middle-class seniors, who have saved will be forced to fill out all sorts of papers and demonstrate their indigence at a time in their lives when they cannot do those things.

We should continue the system as it is.