Dismantling Social Security: The lies and canards have begun in earnest

http://www.alternet.org/economy/gop-launches-new-attack-social-security-old-lies-and-canards-resurface?akid=12676.294211.GEX-YY&rd=1&src=newsletter1030116&t=23

Please Veto this President Obama

Heritage's defense of the House is a good example of the right's timeworn strategies for concealing -- perhaps, at times, even from itself -- the moral and human implications of its actions. It's written by Romina Boccia, the "Grover M. Hermann fellow in federal budgetary affairs in the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation" -- now there's a title! -- and is called "The House Just Made It Harder for Politicians to Steal From Social Security Retirement Fund."
See what they did there, before we've even read the text? They changed the subject from "disabled Americans" to "politicians." (People hate "politicians," right?) But the money wouldn't go to "politicians," who have generous retirement and disability plans. It would go to the disabled. And it wouldn't be "stolen." It would be borrowed - from the same payroll tax that funds retirement benefits.
The Heritage piece is a compendium of rightwing Social Security feints, many brewed up in the manifold organizations funded by anti-government hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson. We're told, for example, that the House's parliamentary move "set the stage for long-overdue Social Security reforms to protect disabled Americans and seniors from indiscriminate benefit cuts" - as opposed to "discriminate" benefit cuts?) -- and that it "strengthens the integrity of Social Security's separate trust funds" by "prevent(ing) lawmaker from raiding retirement funds to shore up the bleeding disability trust fund."
"Strengthen." "Integrity." Raiding." "Bleeding."
These are code words designed to fire neurons in the lizard brain. Take them away and what's left? The distasteful sight of prosperous Republican House members cutting disabled people's already-meager benefits.
As for the transfer of funds, Ms. Boccia doesn't mention that Congress has made this very minor adjustment 11 times in the past. She makes it sound as if President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew are proposing something novel, strange -- even dangerous.
She even throws in a scare paragraph from a fellow Heritage employee suggesting that the entire program is in danger and warning of the "destitution" that might ensue. Then she tips her organization's hand: "This change," Ms. Boccia writes of the House's move, "sets the stage for comprehensive Social Security reform in the 114th Congress."
Well, of course it does. Disability benefits are just the prelude. They're after bigger game. The right wants what it has wanted ever since Social Security was first created: its dismantlement.

Know what isn't mentioned, either by Ms. Boccia or her commenters? Tax increases on the wealthy and corporations. Actual corporate tax rates -- the amount they actually pay -- are at sixty-year lows. Billionaires pay less than half the tax rate they paid in the 1950s.

CUTTING SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE IS SIMPLY A MEANS TO KEEP BILLIONAIRES AND CORPORATIONS FROM HAVING TO PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE OF TAXES so take money away from poor folks so there is no need to take more money from the richest.