Today, HuffPost reported that Ohio Republican U.S. Senate nominee J.D. Vance “advocated for major reforms to Social Security and Medicare in order to restore ‘fiscal sanity’ to the United States.”
In a blog titled the “Hillbilly Elite,” Vance “argued that Social Security and Medicare were among the biggest drivers of large federal budget deficits” and touted a proposed budget which “called for trillions of dollars to be cut from entitlement programs over a decade: repeal of the Affordable Care Act […]; transformation of Medicaid into a program funded through limited lump-sum grants to states, which would then manage it; and conversion of Medicare into a capped voucher program.”
But since winning the Ohio Republican primary in May — capitalizing on his Hollywood stardom and friendships with Silicon Valley tech billionaires — Vance has changed his tune.
Unfortunately, he never warned his Peter Thiel partner Arizona Republican U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters who last month was caught calling for the privatization of social security.
HuffPost: J.D. Vance Ditches Past Support For Social Security Cuts
By Travis Waldron and Arthur Delaney | July 13, 2022
Key Points:
- “Ohio GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance has in the past advocated for major reforms to Social Security and Medicare in order to restore ‘fiscal sanity’ to the United States.”
- “In a 2010 blog post, Vance — then writing under the name J.D. Hamel — argued that Social Security and Medicare were among the biggest drivers of large federal budget deficits, but that neither Democrats nor Republicans had the political will to enact deep cuts to either federal entitlement program.”
- “‘The political obstacles intimidate more than the practical problems,’ Vance wrote in the post on a personal blog site he used while in law school at Yale. ‘The party of, umm, limited government — the Republican Party — is also the party of the aging white person. The party’s only solid constituency thus depends on the Medicare and Social Security Benefits that are the biggest roadblocks to any kind of real fiscal sanity. The Democrats are similarly hopeless.’”
- “Not all Republican candidates agree, though. Blake Masters, a candidate in Arizona’s GOP Senate primary, called for the privatization of Social Security at a June forum, arguing that millennials like him wouldn’t see the benefits anyway.”
- “‘We got to cut the knot at some point, though, because I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to receive Social Security,’ Masters said. ‘I’m a millennial.’”
- “‘We need fresh and innovative thinking. Maybe we should privatize Social Security,’ he said. ‘Private retirement accounts, get the government out of it.’”
- “Masters, like Vance, has Trump’s endorsement and the backing of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has poured millions of dollars into outside groups supporting both candidates.”
- “Jim Lamon, a businessman running against Masters in the Arizona primary, also calls for raising the retirement age and adding private savings accounts to Social Security on his campaign website, as The American Independent reported in May.”
Read the full HuffPost report here.
Published: Jul 13, 2022 | Last Modified: Aug 26, 2022