Snark Attack!: Tell Obama: Don't Sell Out Medicare

Like many progressives, we were both relieved and devastated when President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced their deal with Republicans on the budget. They averted a government shutdown while fending off some of the biggest attacks on women and the environment. But shockingly, Speaker Boehner emerged from the negotiations with billions more in cuts than he initially asked for.

How did we wind up in a situation where Democrats ultimately agreed to more spending cuts to avert the government shutdown than House Speaker John Boehner first demanded in February? There is no way to describe the Democrats' disastrous negotiating strategy other than one of appeasement.

In effect the Republicans took hostages and, in response, Democratic leadership agreed to pay a very high ransom.

As a result, Republicans are newly emboldened. And they have already boasted about the price they will exact from Democrats in the coming fights over the 2012 budget and the debt ceiling.

President Obama will address the nation today. This will be his opening salvo in the looming fights over the 2012 budget fight and the lifting the national debt ceiling. As he makes his opening bid, he needs to know that he must take Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security off the table.¹

Tell President Obama. Stop caving to hostage takers. Make a stand on the debt ceiling and take Medicare off the table. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

From the beginning of this budget battle, CREDO believed the fight would come down to two ideological battles: Planned Parenthood and the Clean Air Act.

At critical moments, our activists made over 25,000 calls to Democratic senators and the White House demanding that Democrats draw a line in the sand to protect women and the environment. Hundreds of thousands of our members signed petitions. And in key Senate districts, our members attended meetings we arranged with staffers to drive the message home.

In the end, your pressure was great enough that Democratic leadership blunted the Tea Party attacks on women and the environment. Unfortunately on almost every single other priority, Democrats caved to Republicans, giving Speaker Boehner billions of dollars more than the initial $32 billion in cuts he requested when he first came to the table.

And the cuts that have been agreed to are absolutely brutal. Over $1 billion cut from HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis, STD, and TB prevention, $600 million cut from funding for community health centers, and $500 million cut from the Women Infant and Children (WIC) nutrition program for low-income pregnant women.

While we stopped the destruction of the Clean Air Act, the EPA's budget was itself cut by $1.6 billion, or 16% compared to last year.

And what's more, Democrats gave conservatives a right-wing wish list when it comes to the inhabitants of Washington DC by agreeing to abolish needle exchange programs, shifting money from public education to vouchers for parochial schools, limiting access to abortion care and more.

This is what happens when Democrats abandon the principled position that corporations and the rich need to pay their fair share before we inflict suffering on the most vulnerable members of our society.

It is just another example of how the Democrats constantly offer to meet the Republicans halfway, only to see the goal posts moved even further to the right.

The fact of the matter is that the Democrats set themselves up for failure last fall when they extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans and agreed to take other tax increases off the table. The cuts the Democrats agreed to — a brutal $39 billion in the last 6 months of this year — pale in comparison to the $150 billion that would have been raised during the same six months if President Obama had not cut a deal with Republicans to continue the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.²

And now that the stakes are even higher, we simply cannot afford for President Obama to preemptively cede this ground and allow vital programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to be used as bargaining chips in some sort of grand compromise that will ultimately leave most Americans much worse off than before.

Without enormous pressure, Democrats will continue to pay ransom to Republicans rather than defending the most successful, popular and important social programs in our country.

Tell President Obama. Stop caving to hostage takers. Make a stand on the debt ceiling and take Medicare off the table. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

Republicans claim to be alarmed by the deficit. But between needless wars abroad, massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate welfare, they have done more than anyone to cause the deficit. Now Republicans are predictably claiming that in order to responsibly deal with the deficit, we need to destroy the social safety net.

Democrats must actually take a stand for a progressive vision of how to deal with the economic crisis we find ourselves in. Destroying Medicare and making more brutal cuts to vital social services is not the answer. In the near term, the best way we can address the deficit is by getting millions of Americans back to work. But if deficit concerns are driving the narrative, basic fairness demands that we make the rich and obscenely-profitable corporations pay their fair share, we revoke Bush era tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and we stop throwing away over $100 billion a year on an unwinnable war in Afghanistan.

Tell President Obama. Stop caving to hostage takers. Make a stand on the debt ceiling and take Medicare off the table. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

Thank you for speaking out.

Becky Bond, Political Director CREDO Action from Working Assets