Boy, does Jeb want to win the Koch lottery or what? Because he
just wrote off the votes of millions of senior citizens by telling them
he really does mean it when he says he wants to end Medicare. And Social
Security to boot.
At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, an elderly woman blasted Bush.
"We're not going to have adequate coverage for our children or our
grandchildren without Medicare," she told him. "I paid into that for
years and years, just like all these other seniors here, and now you
want to take it away?" Why, she asked, is he "always attacking the
seniors."
"Well, I'm not," Jeb responded. "Here's what I said: I said, 'We're
going to have to reform our entitlement system.' We have to."
"It's not an entitlement," the woman shot back. "I earned that."
"It's an actuarial unsound health care system," said Jeb, who said
something must be done before the system burdens future generations with
$50 billion of debt. "Social Security is an underfunded retirement
system; people have put money into it, for sure.
"The people that are receiving these benefits, I don't think that we
should touch that; but your children and grandchildren are not going to
get the benefit of this that they believe they’re going to get, or that
you think they're going to get, because the amount of money put in
compared to the amount of money the system costs is wrong."
Um, let's just revisit what Jeb actually said about Medicare that set
this protest off. He said, "we need to figure out a way to phase out
this program." Now, "phasing out" could be construed as "reform," if
you're a Republican. But for the rest of us, it pretty much means
"ending."
Jeb says all of this is just the media using "words taken out of
context — exactly what I predicted would happen." His team tried to spin
this as their candidate trying to address "the way we look at
entitlements," and said that it shouldn't be considered a policy
pronouncement, because why would he do that by just dropping it into an
answer at a town hall meeting. Which, pretty much, it seems like he just
did. As the Politico reporter on this story puts it, "it appears Jeb
is more frustrated that Democrats took his words literally, not 'out of
context.'"
Jeb has said that Medicare has to end and he thinks his brother's idea
to privatize Social Security needs to be brought back. Any context Jeb
tries to put that in is still bad.
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