McConnell Supports Slashing Medicare and Social Security — but Wants It Done in Darkness

Tim Libretti, PhD
5 min readFeb 15, 2023
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Mitch McConnell in recent days has sought to distance himself from the Republican Senator from Florida Rick Scott, whose plan to “Rescue America” involves “sunsetting” entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid every five years, meaning it would be at the discretion — indeed political whims — of Congress every five years to re-enact the legislation that makes these programs possible.

Looking at the political composition of Congress today, that basically means Americans could kiss good-bye to their retirement and health insurance.

McConnell’s sudden antipathy to Scott’s proposal isn’t so much to the content of the proposal itself but, rather, to saying it out loud. This stance of McConnell’s — advocating for cuts to entitlement programs but being opposed to talking about it — accords with the standard line of Congressional Republicans, who harangued President Biden during his State of the Union address with irate denials when he called them out for their plans to cut Social Security and Medicare and potentially to exploit the need to raise the debt ceiling to demand these cuts.

These denials represent, it must be underlined, pure and unadulterated gaslighting.

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Tim Libretti, PhD
Tim Libretti, PhD

Written by Tim Libretti, PhD

Professor of Literature, Political Economy enthusiast, Dad, always thinking about the optimal world

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