(CNSNews.com) – President Biden and his fellow Democrats claim that Sen. Rick Scott — and by extension, the entire Republican Party — want to cut or end the Social Security and Medicare programs.
Biden said it on Tuesday while campaigning in Florida: “You’ve been paying into Social Security your whole life. You earned it. Now these guys want to take it away. Who in the hell do they think they are? Excuse my language,” the president said.
“I think the heat of South Florida’s gotten to the guy, all right?” Sen. Scott told “Mornings With Maria” on Wednesday.
“He’s a complete liar, all right? I don’t know one Republican that would cut Social Security or Medicare, but you know what, I know that every Democrat just voted to cut $280 billion out of Medicare. And there’s all this testimony where Joe Biden, when he was in the Senate, proposed cutting Medicare and Social Security, and guess what’s happened?
“With this unbelievable inflation that Biden caused, guess what’s going to happen to the number of years of Social Security (solvency). It’s going to keep going down and down and down. So, what the Democrats are doing, Medicare goes bankrupt in four years. And we’ll see when they come out with the new numbers for Social Security, but I can’t imagine it’s going to be lasting more than 10 more years.”
Biden on Tuesday pointed to the plan floated by Scott — not by the Republican Party.
Scott has proposed the following: “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” And: “Force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt.”
Biden told his audience, correctly, that under Rick Scott’s plan, “every five years, the Congress will have to vote to reauthorize Social Security — reauthorize it or else it goes away. Would have to vote to reauthorize Medicare, reauthorize veterans benefits, and I go down the list.”
But Biden then translated “reauthorizing” as “cutting.”
“But guess what?” Biden said. “The very idea that a senator from Florida wants to cut Social Security and Medicare — and, by the way, they don’t have to just — they don’t go away, they can cut it, they can change it basically. A senator from Florida going after Medicare and Social Security? I tell you what, I don’t know — as they say in Southern Delaware, ‘I don’t know where y’all been. Hot damn, boy.'” (Laughter.)
Scott said he believes Congress should have to tell the public every year “how they’re going to fix Medicare and Social Security.”
“And then separately, I said we ought to look at all programs like we do with the military, let’s look at it every year and let’s don’t keep doing programs we don’t need. But with regard to Medicare and Social Security, every Republican wants to preserve it…”
Asked if it was a mistake to float a plan that lends itself to misrepresentation by Democrats, Sen. Scott said Democrats “do the same thing” every election cycle:
“They say Republicans are going to cut Medicare and Social Security. They do it whether you put out a plan or not. I do believe that when you run for office you ought to tell people what you’re going to do. I’m a business guy. I went and raised money when I was running businesses. Nobody gave me money and said I don’t know how I’m going to spend it, just give me the money.
“If you want somebody’s vote you should tell them exactly what you’re going to do do… We ought to be very specific, how are we going to preserve Medicare; how are we going to preserve Social Security. We have to talk about it. Because what’s happening right now, it’s going away and nobody wants to talk about it.”
Scott also noted that inflation will accelerate the solvency problem: “Inflation is really causing unbelievable problems. When you look at — we had a 7 percent increase in Social Security benefits. Well, the revenues are not going up that fast. And so it’s going to drive down the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund faster, so we’ve got to come up with a plan to fix this.”
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