It is perhaps fitting that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) compared the debt crisis to a bankruptcy, though not in the way he intended. Before I give you what Obama is prepared to do, I’ll give you the quote from Sen. Johnson (courtesy Tina Korbe over at Hot Air):
“I’ve been on the unsecured creditor side of a customer going bankrupt,” he said. “If you come to me as an unsecured creditor in a bankruptcy situation where the customer is going through a reorganization and you say, ‘Secured creditors are getting dollar for dollar — that’s interest on the debt, that’s Social Security. The rest of you guys, until we get this figured out, will basically get 60 cents on the dollar. Once we go through the reorganization, once we get this figured out, you’ll probably get 98 cents on the dollar.’ I’d be going, ‘That’s a sweet deal.’ I’d do that in an instant.”
The problem is, that’s just not how bankruptcies happen in the ObamiNation. I’ll let Doug Ross explain why Obama is throwing seniors under the bus (emphasis in the original):
Consider what Obama has already committed to — or is proposing to — cut:
- The Obamacare takeover of the health care industry slashed $500 billlion from Medicare to help pay for the new entitlement.
- The states will be forced to find about $400 billion in Medicaid funding in 2011, this time without the “shovel-ready Stimulus” package which picked up about $100 billion of the tab.
And now the President proposes additional cuts for seniors, this time in the form of reductions in Social Security.
Notice who doesn’t have to sacrifice: the public sector unions, whose support is crucial to Obama’s 2012 relection campaign.
Given the treatment of the creditors in the government seizures of GM and Chrysler in favor of the profiting UAW (at last check, the UAW will end up getting over $1.50 on every dollar GM owed it), we should have seen this coming.
That is not to say, however, that Social Security is a sacred cow. After all, assuming the Trustees’ intermediate-case scenario isn’t too rosy, in order to get the “Trust Funds” to their exhaustion dates of 2018 for the Disability Insurance fund and 2038 for the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance fund, the Treasury Department will need to come up with roughly $7 trillion in cash it doesn’t have.
