Eric Cantor on Social Security: Truth or Misspeaking?

I'm writing a series of posts as a blogging fellow for the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition of more than 270 national and state organizations.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is under fire today for telling NPR his vision of America doesn't include Social Security and Medicare. The Republican from Virginia has 100,000 constituents on the program so he is now claiming he misspoke. The quote:

I mean, just from the very notion that it said that 50 percent of beneficiaries under the Social Security program use those moneys as their sole source of income. So we've got to protect today's seniors. But for the rest of us? For - you know, listen. We're going to have to come to grips with the fact that these programs cannot exist if we want America to be what we want America to be.

Was it the truth, a Freudian slip or did he screw up and forgot to say what he meant? It's tough to figure someone as accomplished as the House Majority Leader would make a statement like this and claim he didn't mean it. Which part didn't he mean? Let's take a look at what we're seeing the Republicans revealing about the "America we want to be."

President George W. Bush tried privatizing Social Security in 2005. Then Sen. Rick Santorum went on a tour around Pennsylvania shortly thereafter promoting the plan which would send billions of dollars in investment fees to Wall Street bankers so they could gamble away our retirements. We caught this video when he entered his town hall at Drexel University back then:

Now and then Republicans screw up and allow their real agenda to appear. Cantor's vision of America is obviously one where the elderly are impoverished and dependent upon the largess of their children for survival. Disabled persons should simply crawl away and perish rather than receive medical care and a stipend to help them survive. It is an America without child labor laws, unions, teachers and public schools, workplace safety, limits on banker's salaries, a middle class, regulations for the robber barons of Wall Street, medical care, abortion services, equal pay for women, taxes for the richest Americans, restrictions on oil and gas companies, regulation of greenhouse gases, no renewable energy, no teaching of science in schools, no restrictions on guns and ammunition, no restrictions on fraudulent banking practices and securities, and the suppression of the vote for demographics who vote Democratic.

We are seeing Cantor's vision for America playing out in Congress and statehouses all across the nation but we're supposed to believe his statement about Social Security and Medicare were in error? That he simply misspoke? I report, you decide.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future