It’s awful how lefties fear-monger about Social Security, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in trouble.  It is.  We all know it is.  Just not how the left portrays it.  It’s just groaning under its own weight and sooner or later, likely sooner, the Hill is going to have to tackle it.  Being the pedantic, unoriginal cowards that they are, they’ll likely look to the past for how to do it.  What’s back there?

Obama.

Obama showed them how they might do it.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

Your money, in the form of the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) and your life, in the form of the IPAB (Independent Payment Advisory Board, sometimes known as “the death panel”), are two 2010 agencies which are now dead, or about to be, thank God, but there is where our brave legislators will find their “inspiration” for how to fix Social Security, I am willing to bet.  Why?  There’s a very specific reason why — a legislative scam — as you will see in a moment.

Let’s review:  In March & July 2010 two of the most sweeping pieces of legislation since FDR and LBJ were signed by Obama, creating the IPAB via ObamaCare, and the CFPB via the Dodd-Frank Wall Street “reform” bill. Legislators buried these agencies so deep inside the federal leviathan that they could not simply vote to defund them. This was purposeful.  So the only way to kill them, should they or the voters desire it, was to hope the Executive Branch would choose to kill them, or, as is the case with the IPAB, die of neglect.

Thus insulated, they had a mandate from our brave Senators and Representatives: take the unpopular votes we’re too chickensh*t to take. They actually fixed it so the unelected bureaucrats would take the tough votes on, say, trimming Medicare for example, and then unless Congress voted to override them, their vote would stand.  Pretty sweet scam, huh?  No wonder they voted “yea.”  It was a great deal if you’re a legislator.  They could point at the boards and say “Wasn’t us!  It was the agency!”  And then rely on the hope that most of America would not read an article like this and then go on to blame the evil agencies and not the lousy legislators.

So how, fifteen years later, are these agencies dead or gasping?

A February 2018 Health Affairs piece entitled “IPAB RIP” described the scam, how it was supposed to work, and how, through serial neglect, the agency died, thank God:

[Then] Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) included the idea that became IPAB in his Committee’s version of what eventually became the ACA. IPAB would be a 15-member body that would create a plan for Medicare cuts triggered by excessive growth in the program’s per capita costs. IPAB’s recommendations would specify enough cuts to reduce program spending to growth levels set forth in the law. Congress would have the ability to accept the plan or create an alternative that saved an equal amount. Absent Congressional action, IPAB plan would become law. [Emphasis added.]

[snip]

As the new law provided, IPAB wasn’t to make any recommendations until the Actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) certified that projected Medicare spending, per capita over a five-year period, would rise to a level that exceeded targets established in the ACA. Each year, from 2013 through 2017, the Actuary completed its estimates and in no year did they exceed the targets. Thus, IPAB had nothing to do.

Further, IPAB had no members. The President was to appoint its members based on recommendations from Congressional leaders. In 2013, the Congressional Republican leaders told President Barack Obama that they opposed IPAB (along with the entire ACA) and weren’t going to make any recommendations. The Obama administration itself hinted that it was looking at making appointments but never made any citing the lack of a need for members given the Actuary’s estimates.

And now [in February of 2018], without ever any members, staff, or even logo or website, IPAB is gone.

Congress may be evil but they’re not stupid.  They’ve learned from this.  They will adjust and adapt so there aren’t unachieved/unachievable targets next time.

And what of CFPB?  Fauxcahontus, er, Senator Warren’s brainchild?  Thankfully it’s in its death throes.

Via Fox Business:

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought was selected by Trump to serve as acting director of the CFPB, which he quickly attempted to dismantle.

We got lucky and got an Executive Branch who chose to kill it.

Vought was stopped, of course, by a judge, but it’s now received a favorable ruling on appeal and the dismantlement is at hand.

Team Obama had been busy.  The “fundamental transformation” from a nation of laws to a nation of men had been given structure.  He told us it was coming. In a March 2009 New York Times interview he “pledged that he would ‘get all the pillars in place.’” Thank goodness, fifteen years later, those pillars are now nearly dust.  But with Social Security bursting at the seams, it’s ripe for another one of these scams, so be ever vigilant.

Image generated by AI.