• President Biden’s statement during the State of the Union address that some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years was true.
• This statement was based on Florida senator Rick Scott’s 11-point plan, which promised that all federal legislation would sunset in 5 years.
• Republicans have a long history of calling for cuts to Social Security, including Trump, Mike Pence, Ron Johnson, and the Republican Study Committee.
• Biden’s statement comes from the “reality-based community,” which was famously dubbed in 2002 by a senior advisor to George W. Bush.
• Trump’s campaign hired a consulting firm to try to prove that the election had been stolen, but the firm could not find anything that would have changed the outcome.
• Representative George Santos and Anna Paulina Luna have both been accused of fabricating their biographies.
• Political decisions that are not based on reality rob us of our right to make informed decisions about our government and what it will do.
• Social Security and Medicare can be stabilized by cutting benefits, raising taxes, rearranging government funding, or by some combination of the three.
• Voters need fact-based information to elect people who will enact the policies a majority of us want.
Published February 12, 2023
Visit Letters from an American to read Heather Cox Richardson’s original post February 11, 2023