This would be hilarious if it wasn't so awful:
Ladies and gentlemen, here's your preview of the 2014 Republican campaign commercials, from Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), who is chairman of the NRCC, the GOP's House re-election committee.
BLITZER: Well, let's talk about these proposed changes that the president is putting forward when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, the shocking proposals that you say the president's putting forward that could affect seniors. What's so shocking about changing that CPI, that consumer price index the way that you would determine how much inflation would go ahead with increases for Social Security recipients, for example?
WALDEN: Well, once again, you're trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors and I just think it's not the right way to go.
Imagine me having to write that it is the Republicans who always want to cut "entitlements", it is the Republicans who want to kill Social Security dead and get rid of Medicare (switching it to those vouchers which are like the scratch-and-sniff cards in seriousness) and it is the Republicans that Obama tried to appease with these proposals! But soon these proposals could be the Democrats' proposals, because they truly are unpopular.
OK. That is exaggerated, because other Republicans are less critical of the chained CPI part of Obama's budget proposal:
Even as GOP leaders slammed Obama’s budget as a whole Wednesday, they found room to offer some praise for his approach to entitlements, which includes Social Security.
“The President seems prepared to finally concede this time that at least something needs to be done to save entitlements from their inevitable slide toward bankruptcy,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Obama “does deserve some credit for some incremental entitlement reforms that he has outlined in his budget.”
Should I do a post on the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI)? The short-and-sour part of it is that using it to calculate Social Security payments will lower them. Another short-and-bitter part is that the general CPI doesn't have a terrible amount of relevance for the retired people because the consumption bundle it is based on doesn't accurately reflect the cost items which are most important for the elderly, such as health care costs.