President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama,
First, I want you to know that I worked for your campaigns in 2008 and 2012. I met with members of the Sheepshead Bay Organizing for America Team weekly and made innumerable phone calls on your behalf. Naturally, I voted for you in both elections.
My husband was laid off in July 2009 and your actions were a great help to us. Because COBRA was divided between employer and employee, we were able to afford COBRA on my husband’s unemployment benefits. This would not have been the case if we had to pay the full 102%. We were also able to continue our son on the health benefit plan even though he was turning 20 years old.
Although my husband sought and found five jobs, including working for the Census in 2010, none of them lasted. The job climate today has been terribly eroded due to corporations simply refusing to give employees full time jobs with benefits any more. So, he was unable to continue building up his Social Security benefits over the past 4 years as he would have had his original company not gone bankrupt and closed the plant where he worked.
Now, however, you have included chained CPI in your proposed budget, which is clearly a cut to Social Security. That is a direct break in your promise to your base, that you would not allow cuts to Social Security. Medicare cuts are included in that budget as well. I am less clear whether they are direct cuts to beneficiaries. But the chained CPI will directly affect and harm today’s and future seniors as well as veterans who have become disabled fighting for our country.
Some are saying this was a bargaining chip, and lo and behold, the Republicans rejected it out of hand because it doesn’t cut enough! But is anyone, including you, pointing out that Social Security has no effect whatever on the deficit? Why harm us so that the Republicans might (doubtful) accept revenue increases on the 1% they so abjectly serve?
Mr. President, I am tired of the Republicans creating one financial crisis after another. They deserve no concessions. It is time to stop negotiating with terrorists and it will never be time to offer to cut Social Security and Medicare in order to appease them. It is time to fight for a jobs bill, to fight for repairing our pitifully outdated and rickety infrastructure, and it is time to fight to repeal the sequester, which is already harming millions of Americans.
I do not have your back on this. Take Social Security cuts and any Medicare cuts that affect beneficiaries out of your budgets, Sir. This is not what we voted for, not why I gave my Tuesday nights up for during the months leading up to your election and re-election. Please stand tall as you did during the campaign and protect the American people from the Republican terrorists.
Sincerely,
Celeste Leibowitz
34
9 years ago
