CAN IT HAPPEN?

There are Republicans and members of the heirarchy of the Tea Party that would like to do away with things like Social Security and Medicare, and, of course, Obamacare. Others would just like to reduce them to help balance the budget, something that must be done at some point. But would it be possible to do away with them? It is not clear that at the grass roots level that Tea Partiers share this goal, for instance (http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/whose-tea-party-is-it/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1).

Suppose we got a clever Republican administration like that of Bush-43 that wanted to do away with them. I imagine that first a part of your Social Security payments would go into something like a 401k. Then more and then more until the whole thing was a 401k. Also somewhere along the line it probably would be made voluntary. So Social Security would be no more.

Medicare would suffer something equivalent to Social Security. It, no doubt, would start with vouchers as in the Ryan plan. With time because of inflation the vouchers would pay less and less of your medical expenses. And of course, it would be made voluntary at some point. And perhaps at some point the vouchers would just be discontinued.

Now the Bush-43 like administration would concentrate on convincing the voting public to go along with this plan, and they would use all the wiles they used to get us to go to war in Iraq to getting rid of Social Security and Medicare. I'm not sure what they would do, but truth would be no object just as it wasn't with us going to war in Iraq. Could this happen? I don't know, but the current candidates for the Republican presidential nomination certainly sound like they would like to do this. Perhaps they could somehow make it unpatriotic to be against doing away with Social Security and Medicare just as they did with the Iraq war.

Could it happen?