This last point is the critical one for me, and most illustrative of why I find the effort to cut Social Security so appalling. For the moment, leave to the side abstract debates over the propriety of social programs, or even debates over specific proposals such as raising the retirement age or means-testing. Instead, let's look at what is happening more broadly:
One of the most significant developments in the U.S. is the rapidly and severely increasing rich-poor gap. A middle class standard of living is being suffocated and even slowly eliminated, as budget cuts cause an elimination of services that are hallmarks of first-world living. Because the wealthiest Americans continue to consolidate both their monopoly on wealth and, more important, their control of Congress and the government generally, we respond to all of this by enacting even more policies which exacerbate that gap and favor even more the wealthiest factions while taking more from the poorest and most powerless. And now, the very people responsible for the vulnerable financial state of the U.S. want to address that problem by targeting one of the very few guarantors in American life of a humane standard of living: Social Security.
Advocates of cutting Social Security -- like Jonathan Chait and the Post's Fred Hiatt -- are the same people who cheered on the attack on Iraq and other policies of endless American War, which has drained America's budget and turned it into a debtor nation. Millions of other human beings -- but not, of course, them -- suffered and sacrificed for those policies. And now that it's time to address the economic carnage caused by all of this, to what do they turn for savings? The handful of social programs which provide at least some small guarantee of a minimally decent standard of living in old age. (Source)