With Obama, What Are The Republicans Complaining About?

From Forbes (blog):

First, no one can accuse President Obama of not cutting federal spending; he cut a half-trillion-dollars from Medicare without reforming it. Top Administration aides and the Republican congressional leadership are now conspiring to extend this cuts-without-reform approach to Social Security. House Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling opines publicly that Social Security cannot be preserved without major benefit cuts while the president’s debt commission is on the record saying “benefit adjustments” will be required, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner also pushes hard in secret talks for benefit cuts.

The bipartisan scheme being cooked up would convert Social Security into the world’s biggest welfare program by means testing it and forcing everyone to work into their seventies. There are indications that “means testing” would include not only determining benefit levels by the retiree’s wealth and income, but also would include both raising the FICA payroll tax cap on workers’ taxable earnings and increasing the tax on Social Security benefits for “upper-income” beneficiaries. By abandoning any effort to transform Social Security into a compulsory, actuarially sound, market-based, retirement-saving program, the bipartisan welfare approach to Social Security “reform” would actually increase dependency on government and make an already bad deal much worse for most workers. Pay more; get less — doubling down on a Ponzi Scheme.


Second, no one can fault the president for partisanship; he embraced the Republican proto-type for a state-run health care system (including an individual health-insurance mandate and centralized medical planning) and jammed through the Congress a national version of it partially funded by the Medicare cuts. The Godfather of ObamaCare, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, is among the GOP’s front-runners for president in 2012.

Third, no one can accuse President Obama of standing in the way of “bipartisan tax reform.” He allowed the Bush tax cuts to be extended as a good-faith gesture to pave the way for negotiating tax reform within a bipartisan framework. Rather than scrapping the tax code as the Kemp Commission recommended more than a decade ago, Republicans and the president are operating together inside a bi-partisan paradigm that would preserve the oppressive and economically destructive progressive income tax rather than replacing it with a pro-growth, pro-family system that taxes only income consumed at a single, low rate.

Story continues here.


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That's not "change we can believe in."