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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

What is the political incentive to do this ever?

Where is the political incentive not to do this ever? If you reduce spending on social safety nets, you can reduce taxes on the wealthy, and as a bonus the poor die. win/win.

You can reduce taxes on the wealthy without reducing spending, which is what the Republicans just did, kicking the can down the road to a future administration while getting the political benefit of the current spending.

My thinking was, cutting taxes via budget reconciliation (which is the only process the currently paralyzed legislature can do) requires some hand waving deference to the notion of being revenue neutral by the Byrd rule, so cuts to social programs or rollbacks of government spending have been increasingly included as a way to get tax cuts. Tax cuts fund your donors who fund your reelection campaign.

But, I just looked it up again for this comment and that same rule says "No changes to social security" in reconciliation. It is specifically called out as forbidden to touch via reconciliation unlike almost every other program. So, maybe you are right, it will just be ignored because it doesn't seem possible to quietly change.

The income part of SS is more or less subsistence level, which arguably was its intention to keep the elderly from begging in the streets. But in the dystopian US healthcare system, Medicare is arguably the more important part of the social net. Without it, you are not going to afford any healthcare in old age.

If this budget hits the PAYGO limits, which is basically guaranteed, that will trigger automatic cuts to Medicare, so they can backdoor cut the program without anybody voting for that.

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