Exposed: The Republican Sleazy Playbook to Destroy Social Security

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/exposing-republican-partys-sleazy-playbook-destroy-social-security?akid=12779.294211.NLYGJL&rd=1&src=newsletter1031685&t=5

In one of its first actions, the Republican House of Representatives of the 114th Congress, changed its rules to manufacture a Social Security crisis.
GOP Representatives Tom Reed and Sam Johnson introduced a procedural rule change, which was buried on page 30 of 32 in House Resolution 5.   It forbids the House from transferring money between the Social Security Retirement Fund and the Social Security Disability Fund - a move that Congress has made 11 times in the past, irrespective of which party was in control. The result is that the Disability Fund, which is expected to run out of reserves next year, cannot be helped using money from the Retirement Fund.  Without this “easy fix” - as the New York Times called it - recipients of Social Security Disability will see a 19% cut in benefits.
At a glance, this move by the GOP-led House seems irrational, cynical - counterproductive.  But if you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook - it makes complete sense...
Odds are you've never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have become a "successful" president, Republicans never would have taken control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.

In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that – like an inexorable law of nature – would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005, when Jude Wanniski died and George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush supply-side-created bubble economies in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:"...Jude's charismatic focus on the tax on capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four administrations. ... [T]he capital-gains tax has come erratically but inexorably down -- while the market capitalization of U.S. equities has risen from roughly a third of global market cap to close to half. ... These many trillions in new entrepreneurial wealth are a true warrant of the worth of his impact. Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize."
In reality, his tax cuts did what they have always done over the past 100 years – they initiated a bubble economy that would let the very rich skim the cream off the top just before the ceiling crashed in on working people. The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today.
Next year, when the Disability Trust Fund runs out of money, the GOP’s plan is for force Democrats to become the anti-Santa, yet again. If Congress does nothing because the “easy fix” is unavailable due the Republican rule change, Disability Santa will take a 19% cut.
Reed said of his rule change, “Anyone who cares about finding a fair solution for both the catastrophically disabled who depend on SSDI and senior citizens who depend on Social Security knows that we must find a long-term solution which protects both of them rather than a short term band aid which threatens them both.” It is clear that the GOP plan is to use this unnecessary, manufactured crisis as an opening to “reform” Social Security - translated: cut and privatize.  Thus, forcing Democrats to become the Social Security anti-Santa a different way.
When this happens, Democrats must remember Jude Wanniski - and accept neither the cut to disability payments, nor the entree to Social Security “reform”They must demand the the House rule be changed back, and that the fix used many times in the past, be used again.