An Obama Alum Mourns How Effective Their Social Security Demagoguery Was

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has somehow managed to avoid an encounter with reputational or professional consequences for damaging his employer’s credibility, drew my attention to a provocative op-ed this morning:

 

 

The search-engine-optimized headline Times editors chose to grace the essay composed by the chairman of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, did the piece’s author no favors: “Social Security Is Going Broke,” it read. “Where Is the Outrage?”

 

“This week the Social Security trustees announced that the trust fund for retirees and survivors will be exhausted in just six years,” Furman wrote. “That’s six years before tens of millions of Americans could see their benefits cut by 22 percent.”

 

“The crisis is closer than anyone in the Clinton or Bush years ever imagined we might let it get,” Obama’s top economic mind asserted. Alas, Furman mourned, policymakers are likely to “kick” the crisis “down the road again” with temporary stopgaps, and the public is either apathetic or hostile toward meaningful reforms that could avert the program’s imminent insolvency.

 

This, Furman suggests, is a fact of life as intractable as the weather. Social Security is “the third rail of American politics,” he warned. “Touch it and you get electrocuted.”

 

How did we find ourselves in this predicament? Furman’s cursory historical review fails to uncover a culprit. Perhaps his investigation was hindered by his obvious conflict of interest. After all, the problem Furman laments has been dutifully cultivated by the political party to which he has devoted himself.

 

Democrats spent decades demagoguing the issue of Social Security reform, attacking anyone who dared notice the program’s documented shortfalls. It was a reckless and irresponsible political messaging campaign. But it was also a wildly successful one on the Democratic Party’s own terms.

 

Recall how Democrats reacted back in 2005 when George W. Bush proposed allowing workers to divert just 4 percent of their payroll taxes into personal retirement investment accounts. Furman’s former boss, the 44th president, accused Bush of attempting to “privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement.”

 

From the presidential pulpit, Obama continued to radicalize the public against sensible reforms to America’s unfunded liabilities, accusing Republicans of adding “trillions of dollars to our budget deficit while tying your benefits to the whims of Wall Street traders and the ups and downs of the stock market.” Obama didn’t quite accuse Republicans of wanting to “destroy” Social Security, but Democrats didn’t object when legacy media outlets did.

 

“Cutting benefits in half, risking Social Security on the stock market,” warned the narrator in one pro-Obama spot from the 2008 campaign. “The Bush-McCain privatization plan. Can you really afford more of the same?” Even the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus was repulsed by the Obama campaign’s mendacity. “The Obama campaign stretches the truth beyond recognition when it says that this would cut benefits in half,” she observed.

 

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s 2012 presidential campaign made a valiant effort to persuade Americans of the fiscal reality that would consume them if they failed to confront it. When it came to Social Security, the Romney-Ryan camp’s message hued closely to the statutory language. In the absence of reform, they warned, the law compels Social Security to cut benefits for current recipients.

 

“We respect you enough to level with you,” Ryan told an unruly AARP audience in the fall of 2012. America’s entitlement programs are on a trajectory toward insolvency — an ill-fated arc worsened by Obamacare. But the American people were in no mood to be reasoned with, and the Obama White House exploited their attachment to the fantasy that Social Security was on sound footing.

 

The Romney-Ryan ticket “could include increasing taxes on Social Security benefits for middle-class seniors by an average of $460 a year,” the Obama campaign warned (a prospect Furman now embraces, among other “tweaks”). But that was “not part of Romney’s tax plan,” the Center for Public Integrity noted. Nor did the Romney-Ryan ticket seek “higher taxes for seniors on Social Security, including taxing benefits for seniors who make less than $32,000 a year for the first time ever,” as Obama’s allies claimed.

 

The Obama campaign even published a video warning seniors that Republicans would steal money from the pockets of the elderly so they couldn’t afford even that $20 on “a birthday present for your grandson.” No wonder those AARP activists were hopping mad.

 

By the end of the last decade, not only had the general public been persuaded that Social Security was just fine, but the progressive left concluded that the program could and should be expanded.

 

In 2019, Elizabeth Warren’s aborted presidential campaign published a widget that allowed users to calculate how much money they’d receive from her bigger, bolder Social Security program. “We should be increasing Social Security benefits and asking the richest Americans to contribute their fair share to the program,” her campaign declared in a display of contempt for those of us who know who pays payroll taxes, from which Social Security’s funding is statutorily drawn. Bernie Sanders agreed. “It is time to expand Social Security, not cut it,” he declared. Progressive Democrats have been attempting to do just that via legislation ever since.

 

Democrats got what they wanted. If Social Security is difficult to reform today, that’s only because the public believes Democrats when they contend that it needs no reforming. And the Trump-led Republican Party has thoroughly internalized the lessons they were taught by the Obama operation in 2012.

 

“There are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty,” JD Vance said on the campaign trail in 2024. In his piece, Furman mourns the inclusion of a provision in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that “included a de facto benefit increase that came at the expense of revenues partially earmarked for Social Security,” which contributed to the dire projections now coming from the program’s trustees.

 

That was fiscally reckless, but it takes a lot of nerve to blame the GOP for responding to the political inducements the Democratic Party has expertly exploited.

 

Furman positions himself as a brave truthteller, but he’s not telling the whole story of how the nation committed itself to a fiscal crisis. He and the president he served deserve their share of the blame, but that’s not what Times readers want to hear. Thus, Furman’s piece is yet another contribution to the Democratic Party’s decades of mendacity when it comes to Social Security.