GOP Lawmakers Mull Social Security, Medicare Commission

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Monday during a speech at the New York Stock Exchange that the House will vote in the coming weeks “on a bill to lift the debt ceiling into next year, save taxpayers trillions of dollars, make us less dependent on China, and curb high inflation — all without touching Social Security or Medicare.”

McCarthy did not mention, however, the talk in Washington that GOP lawmakers are mulling proposals “to look into Social Security and Medicare — a politically risky idea that reflects some Republicans’ view that balancing the budget is too steep of a climb without changing the retirement and health safety nets for millions of Americans,” Axios reported Friday.

Indeed, Greg Valliere, chief U.S. strategist for AGF Investments, said Monday in his Capitol Insights email briefing that there’s GOP talk of creating “a bipartisan commission to address the long-term solvency of those programs — another classic ‘kick the can’ option.”

House Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole, R-Okla., has called for forming such a commission as a condition of raising the debt ceiling, but the White House opposes this idea, Axios reported.

Maria Freese, senior legislative representative for the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told ThinkAdvisor Monday in an email that “commissions, by nature, are designed to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

Feese said that “the precedent to this latest (reported) GOP proposal is the Simpson-Bowles Commission of 2011, which recommended raising the retirement age and adopting a miserly [cost-of-living adjustment] formula. Fortunately, it went nowhere in Congress.”

Conservatives, Feese said, “love the idea of commissions because it takes their fingerprints off of potential benefit cuts while shunning revenue increases — with the idea of fast-tracking cuts through Congress. We endorse revenue-side solutions to Social Security that go through regular order — such as Bernie Sanders’ Social Security Expansion Act and Rep. John Larson’s Social Security 2100 Act.”