Obama has stated "reforming" Social Security as a goal of his over many years.
He brings up "reforming" Social Security over and over, in every election and in many of his speeches.
Cutting Social Security is one of his long-term goals.
Source please? Links?
Here you go, with video from 2006:
Obama at the Hamilton Project, 2006: “This is not a bloodless process.”
For those on the left, and I include myself in that category, too many of us have been interested in defending programs the way they were written in 1938... {diarist's comment: hmmm... what was created back then? actually 1935 for Social Security and 1938 for Minimum Wage.}
.....
...So there are real consequences to the work that is being done here. This is not a bloodless process.
(emphasis added) (continued)
"Too many of us have been interested in defending programs." How clear is that?
And directed specifically at the Left: "Those of us on the left," clearly and undeniably.
There was the 2012 debate with Romney:
Obama's Social Security Answer Leaves Democrats Utterly Baffled
"I suspect that on Social Security, we've got a somewhat similar position," Obama said. "Social Security is structurally sound. It's going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Speaker -- Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill. But it is -- the basic structure is sound."
...
"There is a real difference in philosophy," she said. "For Obama to say that he believes he and Romney agree, either Obama has not been straight about his position on Social Security all these years, or he and his campaign haven't looked at Romney's position."
Or here in The Atlantic:
But as Stein notes, during the 2010 debt ceiling negotiations with House Republicans, Obama offered to change the formula to start using the chained CPI instead.
...
Obama hinted that he'd support changing the inflation formula at a town hall event in 2011, and the proposal may have been what he was referring to when he said during his recent debate that he would "tweak" the program much as Ronald Reagan did in his grand compromise with house Democrats in 1983.
Then there is
his admission that he's purposely "a blank screen" for people to project their own ideals upon:
Obama’s famous remark in the preface of the second of his two autobiographies: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
Or here:
Here is yet one more opportunity for frustrated left and liberal Obama supporters/ex-supporters to consider the early and ominous wisdom of the eminent left political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.’s take on an unnamed Obama at the beginning of the future president’s political career in early 1996:
“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program – the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway.”7
Ten years later, Ken Silverstein’s fall 2006 Harpers’ essay, “Obama, Inc.” included the following notable passage:
“It’s not always clear what Obama’s financial backers want, but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in clean government and political reform…On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’” 8
It wasn’t for nothing that Obama set new Wall Street and corporate fundraising records in the last presidential election cycle.
So, that goes back a few years. Hope it helps. There's plenty of good reading at all those links. And, as suggested by others, Google is full of Barack Obama Agrees with Romney on Social Security, Reform Social Security, Tweak Social Security, etc.
Hat tip to Jim P for posting a nice comment walking me through republishing a comment of mine as a Diary. I haven't done that before, but it wasn't as bad as I feared. Still, no, my HTML is not great.
I grew weary this afternoon of reading comment after comment on site after site that Barack Obama really doesn't want to cut Social Security. In fact, it doesn't take much work at all to uncover his longstanding dedication to "reforming" "addressing" or cutting Social Security.
If he wants to strengthen Social Security, let's hear his plans to increase funding and from where. Let's hear how the wealthy who crashed the economy will be asked to contribute and how that will be done in a progressive, rather than regressive way. The economic crash has already cut the benefits of all those who are/were unemployed and thus have fewer dollars credited to their Social Security accounts. When they retire, their benefits will be lower than if their incomes had continued.
The clear and present line is this:
Reducing benefits, falling behind the cost of living (farther behind in fact), raising retirement age, instituting Chained CPI or his duplicitous "Superlative CPI" as described on the White House website [1 pg PDF] , is a CUT, pure and simple.
It IS a CUT and he WANTS to do it.
I know it is bad form to post a diary then not "tend" to it, but I have a busy evening and I'm exhausted from work. I'll try to tend it as I can, a bit tonight and then revisit tomorrow.
Rational and thoughtful discussion is welcome. Ad homs can take a hike. Feel free to use the comments to pile up more evidence: there is a wealth of it out there.