How to protect Social Security, in two easy steps: Step One: enlist an army. We've done that -- 3,000,000 people have signed petitions demanding "No ...

WASHINGTON -- Two House Republicans have told constituents they oppose proposed cuts to Social Security and veterans benefits by reducing the cost of ...

WASHINGTON -- The majority of Senate Democrats running for reelection in 2014, including three running in red states, have broken with President Barac...

For the COLA, instead of an annual percent increase, which rewards some hugely and others not so much, we should determine a fixed amount of increase, and assign everyone that same increase.

WASHINGTON -- Late in 2012, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the leading organization promoting a grand budget bargain that incl...

Seventy-seven million baby boomers have entered or are approaching retirement. Social Security will make up the bulk of the income most of these seniors will have at their disposal. As our private retirement system continues to underperform and Medicare premiums rise, cutting Social Security COLAs based on a false premise is bad policy.

The Democratic base will face its own challenges. Is it prepared to fight the president and Democratic leadership that not so long ago it worked so hard to elect, and has defended so vociferously, despite growing income inequality and continuing high unemployment?

Democrats should fight for jobs programs and pay equity for women, not fight to cut Social Security. Democrats should realize that when the winds of national opinion are at our back, it is folly to sail against these winds and disaster to downsize the legacy of our party.

The bipartisan deal we should be seeking would leave Social Security and veterans' benefits and taxes alone and cut the bloated Pentagon budget instead.

Fiscal conservatives around Obama have sold the president on the idea that nipping and tucking Social Security and Medicare is an easy way to get a lot of money, and doing it by the backdoor will entail a lower political cost to him. So far, he seems to have been proven wrong on all three assumptions. The Republicans haven't given an inch, the $270 billion in cuts undertaken so far this year under the January budget deal and the March sequester have cut the growth rate in half, and he is alienating core Democratic constituencies. One unanticipated benefit of Obama's stance is new, explicit pressure on Democratic House and Senate members, as well as candidates considering running for president in 2016, to pledge not to cut Social Security and Medicare. It would be so much better if this Democratic president were behaving as a progressive leader right now.

WASHINGTON -- A couple of days to think about President Barack Obama's proposal to cut Social Security hasn't done much to calm liberals furious about...

During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama made two specific promises when it came to Social Security. "John McCain's campaign h...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's budget proposal divided House Democrats on Wednesday. The budget blueprint includes a Social Security benefi...

Barack Obama decisively defeated Republicans in the 2012 election. But Republicans are successfully kicking his butt in the post election.

The Republican bargaining habit is well-established -- take Obama's "final" offer as the new starting point and demand further concessions. With this strategy, our president has let them take him to the cleaners for more than four years now, and is still hoping that sweet reasonableness will produce compromise. It never has and never will. If Democrats stand for anything, it is defense of Social Security and Medicare -- America's two most broadly beneficial and most beloved government programs -- and the president just gave away this last bit of product differentiation. In the past, Republicans have saved Obama from himself by refusing to consider any tax hikes. Now, I'm beginning to think, it's time for Democrats save him from himself. And the Democratic Party. And us.

No jobs. No growth. Falling income. Unaffordable colleges. A dying middle class. Young people without hope. The greatest economic inequality in modern history. And yet, in the midst of the Long Depression, we're told that the president intends to cuts Social Security.

On Tuesday, President Obama announced a federal effort to map the human brain in unprecedented detail. With any luck, it might help explain the kind of loopy thinking we saw demonstrated at the end of the week. On the one hand, we had the latest jobs report, which showed a country still in crisis, with the addition of only 88,000 new jobs, and the share of the population in the workforce falling to the lowest point in decades. Yet the leaked details of the president's new budget show a focus not on job creation but on cutting the deficit by $1.8 trillion over the next 10 years (in addition to cutting Social Security benefits). So amidst hard evidence of our profound and continuing economic crisis, we get a budget offering a solution to a different (and far less pressing) problem. It's enough to set what Obama called "the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears" spinning.

WASHINGTON -- Progressive-leaning groups reacted quickly and angrily to news that President Barack Obama is proposing cuts to Social Security, going s...

The only thing that can stop President Obama from cutting Social Security now is Congress. Therefore, the only thing that can stop President Obama from cutting Social Security now is public pressure on Congress to stand up to Obama and say no.

If you are under 40, your generation is getting utterly screwed compared to mine, and you should be in the streets. There are plenty of injustices in this country, but they have little to do with old versus young and everything to do with the one percent versus everyone else. You don't have to cut my Social Security benefits to give your generation a decent break. The secret sauce of my generation was that when I was young, prosperity was widely shared, ladders were plentiful, and tax rates were progressive. If gazillionaires pay their fair share, and we invest adequately in the young, there's no reason why Generations Y and Z can't enjoy the same economic tailwind that my generation did. That, however, will not just happen. It requires a politics -- and not the politics of young versus old, much less the politics of austerity.

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans emerged from their Thursday afternoon lunch with words that might be terrifying to some Democrats: The president may ...

It's time to have a national discussion about how to ensure that Social Security continues to contribute to the future security of older Americans -- not in the context of reducing a federal deficit it did not create, but with the goal of helping people achieve a comfortable retirement.