Tuesday, September 13, 2011

VIDEO: Rick Perry Calls Medicare And Social Security Unconstitutional

By Ian Millhiser/Think Progress

At last night’s CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential candidate’s debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) repeatedly refused to answer whether he still believes that Social Security is unconstitutional, but Perry wasn’t always so shy. Just last December, Perry addressed a group of conservative lobbyists and state lawmakers at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s National Policy Summit, and he openly and proudly declared his belief that most of the 20th Century violates the Constitution:
The nearly unlimited scope of the federal government contradicts the principles of limited, constitutional government that our founders established to protect us. [...]
The assault on those boundaries continued into the Roosevelt New Deal. [...] [T]he New Deal’s legacy is a glut of federal programs, and [sic] including a bankrupt Social Security system. I don’t know how you would call it anything other than that. I promise you, my two twenty-something year old kids understand that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. It is a Ponzi scheme on the scale that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur. [...]
Then came along President Johnson and its Great Society, and it further eroded our founding fathers’ boundaries that they had put upon the federal government. Medicare! Medicaid!
Watch it:
So Perry knows perfectly well how to explain his belief that America’s seniors must be left in the cold without Social Security or Medicare. He’s just too afraid to say it again now that he wants to be president.

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