The Obama Administration proposes cutting off the heat for the poor and Paul Solman’s take on the raiding of the Social Security trust fund

It's seven degrees below zero in St. Paul, Minn. this morning. Photo by VB

The temperature in St. Paul, Minn. this morning is seven degrees below zero, so it was startling to read the following taken from a NY Times article on the turmoil in Republican ranks concerning proposed budget cuts:

But Republicans have succeeded in shifting the focus to budget cutting so sufficiently that the White House will propose an array of cuts in the budget for next year that Mr. Obama sends to Capitol Hill on Monday.

Administration officials confirmed on Wednesday that the budget would propose to cut in half, to nearly $2.6 billion in fiscal year 2012, a federal program that subsidizes energy costs for low-income households.

The big reduction for the popular Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program immediately drew protests from lawmakers and antipoverty groups, as have several other cuts the administration has previewed for community service and environmental programs.

So it goes: Washington deems it acceptable to continue to fund war-making in Iraq (we’re still an occupying presence there) and Afghanistan and prop up dictators around the world, especially those from oil-producing nations, while cutting off heat for the poor and gutting community service and environmental programs.

In the meantime repeated threats to cut Social Security and Medicare are coming from both sides of the aisle these days. It’s very hard to dig up the facts regarding what has happened to the trust fund supposedly set up for the Social Security program in response to the recommendation of the Greenspan Commission in 1983.

In reply to listener Phyllis Koch’s question in Nov. 2010, the PBS NewsHour’s Paul Solman had this to say:

It is true, of course, that the Greenspan Commission concept has been violated from the very outset. When the amendments authorizing the trust fund were signed into law by President Reagan in 1983, they included a provision to be accounted for "off-budget." So the reported budget balance does not include the social security account -- the billions supposedly being socked away or, in the term of a few years ago, protected in a "lockbox."

This is of course your point, Ms. Koch, when you write about "borrowing from social security": the lockbox has indeed been raided, in the sense that the money in the trust fund was never really set aside or meaningfully protected.

Got that? “the lockbox has indeed been raided.”

The way things are going the nation's poor and low-income seniors will soon be abandoned in favor of other priorities like wars, dictators, oil, and such - all coming to you from a Democratic administration.