Your turn to save Social Security

A lot of commentators are worried about the chaos Freedom Caucus extremists may unleash after all of the concessions they won from their fellow Republicans before OK’ing a new House speaker. Will Republican inquisitors undermine the FBI and other security agencies? Will the Pentagon have enough ships and planes once the budget slashers do their work? Will Ukraine be left to the mercy of Russia?

Don't worry too much about any nefarious schemes of a newly empowered congressional right. Worry more about plans standard-issue Republicans and some old time Democrats have been talking about for a long time: cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

It is true that, as part of the agreement Republicans reached with themselves on their way to confirming a new speaker, a subcommittee will investigate civil liberties violations by federal agencies, the FBI, for example. Is that Republican-ruled sub-committee likely to pay more attention to the FBI coaching Twitter executives to suppress Trump fan stolen-election tweets than to agents targeting Black Lives Matters activists? Of course. But whatever happens, the FBI is going to be fine. It doesn't matter whether J. Edgar Hoover gets caught spying on Martin Luther King, or a later director tells us a leading candidate is careless about national security just before the presidential election: the FBI marches on.

Since House Republicans have agreed with themselves to mandatory budget cuts, you might think funding for the military could be in danger. After all, the defense budget is huge, always growing, and audit after audit, the Pentagon can never figure out what it does with the money. Don't worry about it. The Pentagon is going to go right on getting more money than it knows how to handle because guns, tanks and planes are big business, and big business is the kind of friend a congressperson needs to fund the re-election campaign.

Special appropriations for Ukraine may be at greater risk. True, Republican leaders have raised questions about the actual destination of the weaponry shipped to Ukraine. Still, nobody questions that the Ukrainians are the good guys in their war with Russia. Members of Congress have questioned whether Saudi Arabia is one of the good guys. Yet the U.S. never quite manages to end aid to Saudi Arabia. Military weaponry is big business wherever the weapons go, and big business makes the kind of friends a person who wants to keep on getting elected needs.

The threat to Social Security and Medicare is different. It isn't just a few Freedom Caucus newcomers who fret about entitlement programs. In 2005, President George W. Bush put privatizing Social Security high on his agenda. In their quest for Social Security and Medicare cuts in 2011, Congressional Republicans delayed action on the debt ceiling (a previously agreed upon government borrowing maximum) long enough to cost a lot of workers missed pay checks.. Republicans are now making the same demands as the government once again (it happens every couple of years, usually with no fuss) reaches the debt ceiling.

Unfortunately, Social Security and Medicare can't just assume Democrats are going to make everything all right. On the one hand, President Joe Biden has declared he won't be making any deals on the debt ceiling. On the other, a 2020 Intercept article details then presidential candidate Joe Biden's 40-year history of advocating for Social Security cuts to save the program and to reduce the federal budget.

Why would any politician want to talk about reducing benefits, or raising the age limit for, or privatizing programs as popular as Social Security and Medicare? It's not as if voters are clamoring for cuts. Just the opposite. In answer to an August CNBC poll for example, majorities of both Republican and Democratic voters opposed any cuts to Social Security, and favored raising payroll taxes (not to mention raising the income cap for those taxes) to keep the program strong.

The problem is that Medicare and Social Security don't have as many of the right kind of friends as, say the Pentagon, because corporate America isn't getting the biggest share imaginable from those programs. Easy fix. Resurrect the Bush II privatization plans and Social Security wins a lot of new friends. Imagine the lobbying for Social Security once the investment management companies get a taste of those payroll taxes.

Actually, unnoticed by many, privatization is already underway in the case of Medicare. More and more seniors are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans (enrollees turn over their Medicare benefits to a private insurance company). While these plans cost taxpayers more for each person insured than traditional Medicare, they are popular, right up until the time when the insurance company denies some life-saving treatment (federal investigators reported in May that Advantage insurers frequently deny treatment covered under traditional Medicare). Anyone who has tracked performance of a 401 K retirement account over the past year can also appreciate the downside to privatizing Social Security.

If Social Security and Medicare are short on powerful friends and have no way of winning that kind of friends without putting beneficiaries at risk, who is going to defend them? As the next debt ceiling scuffle gets underway, the only way those two programs come through undamaged will be if enough of us are willing to get loud to protect them.

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Will Rawn of Havre is a retired Montana State University-Northern professor.