The elderly aren't touched.
What is being discussed is cuts to Medicare to people UNDER 55.
And BTW...the first cut is not always the elderly. You forget..the elderly's lobbyists have brought us to this point where the elderly are taking the lionshare of the budget. They haven't been the first to get cut...they've been the first to grab Federal money.
“The elderly are not touched.”
The elderly have been creamed by the Bernanke, Bush II, Obama policies of using the Federal Reserve to artificially suppress interest rates in order to hold down the interest rate on the ballooning federal deficit. The self reliant retiree who could earn 6% on a safe, federally insured CD ladder at the beginning of the Bush II regime in 2001, now earns 1%. Or, had that same retiree invested in a conservative diversified portfolio of stock mutual funds in 2001, that retiree would have lost 50% of the savings in the 2008 market crash.
Whichever path the retiree took to invest savings in the private sector over the past decade, the real after tax and inflation return on savings was negative. A negative return on savings over a decade is not going to encourage people to be frugal nor will it give them faith in the private sector options for conservative savings. For many of the elderly, who paid into Social Security for 40 years and did accumulate enough savings for a self sufficient retirement the last decade has moved them from a comfortable middle class lifestyle to poverty. Add to that the bailouts of Wall Street speculators by the government, and the government shoveling money and free phones at third generation non working urban parasites and you call the elderly greedy?