White House: No Social Security crisis

President Obama doesn’t believe that Social Security is “currently in crisis,” the White House said ahead of Obama’s highly-anticipated fiscal reform speech Wednesday afternoon.

The administration said it would entertain reforms to enhance Social Security’s solvency, but none that smacked of privatization or slashed benefits for current or future generations of retirees.

“The President does not believe that Social Security is a driver of our near-term deficit problems or is currently in crisis,” the White House said in a fact sheet previewing the president’s speech.

{mosads}Obama is set to lay out in a Wednesday speech four key steps that he says would reduce the deficit by $4 trillion within the next 12 years. The president’s plan would cut domestic and defense spending and seek tax reform through closed loopholes. It would also tackle Medicare and Medicaid.

Interestingly, Obama steered clear of declaring outright in his remarks that Social Security isn’t in crisis. In prepared remarks, he echoed White House officials’ previews and said that he wouldn’t agree to fundamentally overhaul that program.

“While Social Security is not the cause of our deficit, it faces real long-term challenges in a country that is growing older,” he said, according to prepared remarks.

He did say, though, that both parties should work together to make the program more solvent, but “without putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans’ guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill have been goading for entitlement reform, particularly when it comes to Social Security. GOP leaders met Wednesday morning with Obama, and said that the president needed to be as specific as possible.

But the president’s plan, at least when it comes to Social Security, could be met with the most scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

A group of three Republican senators unveiled a plan Wednesday morning that, among other things, would raise the retirement age to 70 for future retirees and means-test benefits for Social Security recipients. Other Republican leaders have called for all ideas, including those proposed by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), to be “on the table.”

The president still faces tremendous pressure from the left to leave those entitlement programs intact. And he faces the stubborn resistance of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who generally controls the upper chamber and sets its legislative agenda.

“Two decades from now, I’m willing to take a look at it,” Reid said last month of the prospects of Social Security reform. “It is not in crisis at this stage. Leave Social Security alone. We have a lot of other places we can look that is in crisis. But Social Security is not.”

As if to back up the president, leading liberal Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) said on Twitter:

Potus will say Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. That is a fact. #ThusBachmannWillGetItWrong