I never thought I’d see the day that a Democratic President would include cutting Social Security as part of his budget proposal to Congress.

A key feature of the plan Obama is proposing for the federal budget year beginning Oct. 1 is a revised inflation adjustment called “chained CPI.” This new formula would effectively curb annual annual increases in a broad swath of government programs, but would have its biggest impact on Social Security.

Lookit, Mr. President. Social Security is the crown jewel of all the Democratic accomplishments of the 20th Century. It is not by any definition an extravagant program for its recipients, and it’s self-financing so it’s not contributing to the budget deficit either. So why in the name of all that’s holy to the Democrats would you voluntarily suggest you would accept what are essentially cuts to the growth of its cost-of-living adjustments in exchange for a one-time tax reform which could be reversed the next time the Republicans hold power in the White House and the Senate?

As to the politics of it, here’s Mike Lux at HuffPo, published before the details were known but when the rumor that Chained CPI would be included in the budget was gaining currency:

If Obama includes it in his budget, he is claiming this as a policy idea he supports before he even starts negotiations with the Republicans. This is terrible policy and terrible politics at the same time. In a budget document that has no actual policy impact but that symbolically represents what he stands for and who he wants to fight for, he will alienate senior citizens and the families who worried about taking care of them, he will split his political party down the middle, and — by being the first one to formally propose cuts to Social Security — he will hand Republicans a big political weapon to hurt Democrats in 2014.

This is beyond stupid. This is political malfeasance.

We can only hope that the idiot Republicans will turn this down again because it includes tax “hikes.”

Mr. President, do you really want as your legacy the following? “He was the guy who started the ball rolling on Social Security’s demise back in 2013. Oh, it lasted a few more years, but when President so-and-so won in the 2020 election and Tom Coburn became Senate Majority Leader the Republicans finally got their wish and killed the program in the name of giving Americans their own money back by eliminating the payroll tax which funded it.”