Maybe, according to the Wall Street Journal:

“As the president has consistently said, he does not believe that Social Security is a driver of our near- and medium-term deficits,” White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said in a statement.

Changing the inflation formula so Social Security benefits grow more slowly and raising the Medicare eligibility age were ideas Mr. Obama had been willing to accept this summer, when he was trying to strike a deficit-reduction deal with House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio).
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Instead of raising the Medicare eligibility age, the White House is considering recommending cuts to providers and possibly increasing premiums for wealthier recipients, people familiar with the discussions say. It’s also possible the president would propose changing the inflation calculation for other government programs, which currently use the same measure as Social Security does. The White House declined to comment on those discussions.

One of the problems with the President validating the idea that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security need to be “saved” through cuts is that it opens the door for very different meanings as to how savings can be achieved. I’m sure there are ways to reduce waste in Medicare and Medicaid that won’t affect the delivery of care. But that’s a very different conversation than one about raising the age people qualify for this care. Opening the door to cuts puts everything on the table and allows Republicans to use the exact same frame as Obama to push ideas which will make more Americans rely on private insurance longer and at higher cost.

I really hope the President doesn’t go down the path of cuts to the Big Three social support programs. But I’m not going to take the word of a White House spokesperson as gospel, as only a few months ago the President himself was calling for the exact same cuts that were reported on yesterday. The proof will be in the proposal the President actually makes to Congress and the text of legislation that he asks them to pass.

The Financial Times reports that President Obama is going to propose cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security as part of his deficit reduction proposal.

Barack Obama is expected to lay out a plan next week that would cut several hundred billion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, the large government healthcare schemes for the elderly and the poor, as part of a pitch to cut future deficits by more than $1,500bn.

Senior White House officials said the US president would base a detailed blueprint for fiscal reform, which is to be delivered on Monday, on an earlier speech he delivered in April on deficit reduction.

The announcement could create tensions within the Democratic party, which has traditionally staunchly defended Medicare. Mr Obama’s fiscal proposal will be released just one week after the president unveiled a separate plan to raise more than $450bn to pay for a jobs bill that senior officials said would be the president’s singular focus in coming weeks.
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Mr Obama’s plan could also feature a change in the way the US government measures inflation, switching to a less generous chained-consumer price index. The biggest impact of this measure – which could save between $250bn and $300bn over ten years – would be felt by recipients of Social Security, the retirement scheme.

Obama announced in his jobs speech that he would seek cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, so while that isn’t really surprising, it’s still incredibly disheartening. Cutting Social Security’s COLA benefits is also really destructive.

If a Republican president proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the outcry and opposition from liberal groups would be defining. Democratic members of the House and Senate would fight tooth and nail to stop the cuts. Labor would turn out their members to protest the cuts. The airwaves would be flooded with ads hitting Republicans for this assault on the social safety net and online advocacy groups would bombard the White House with calls, emails, and faxes from outraged members.

But when the cuts are proposed by a Democratic president, the odds of this response seems radically reduced. Labor unions were universally supportive of the President’s jobs speech, praising him for turning towards job creation and infrastructure investment. I don’t hold out hopes that there will be an equally swift outpouring of statements criticizing Obama for trying to pay for tax cuts by cutting Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

There are obvious electoral problems with a Democrat leading the charge to cut the Big Three programs. It’s a Nixon going to China moment, only this time it’s a bad thing. But more importantly, these cuts will have a devastating human affect. These are programs that keep people out of poverty. These programs care for sick people. They are crucial to maintaining a middle class in America. The idea that we have to cut these programs to “save” them was treated as a laughable oxymoron by progressives laughed when Republican politicians said it. If Obama goes ahead with these proposals, he should face the exact same response from the left as his ideological predecessors in the Republican Party received.

After the deficit deal passed a month ago, I made this prediction about the jobs pivot:

If I had to put money down, I’d predict that if any jobs bill moves forward, it will consist of more than 50% tax cuts, and probably more likely, a four or five to one ratio of tax cuts to stimulative spending measures.

Of the $447 billion in the jobs segment of Obama’s proposal, we have this breakdown:

O.K., about the Obama plan: It calls for about $200 billion in new spending — much of it on things we need in any case, like school repair, transportation networks, and avoiding teacher layoffs — and $240 billion in tax cuts.

Keep in mind that Obama is rolling out a two-part plan here. First, he previewed the American Jobs Act as a largely job creation piece of legislation. But within that preview, the President also made clear that he will pair this with a deficit reducing agenda that exceeds $1.5 trillion. From the speech:

The agreement we passed in July will cut government spending by about $1 trillion over the next 10 years. It also charges this Congress to come up with an additional $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Tonight, I am asking you to increase that amount so that it covers the full cost of the American Jobs Act. And a week from Monday, I’ll be releasing a more ambitious deficit plan — a plan that will not only cover the cost of this jobs bill, but stabilize our debt in the long run.

Given that the GOP mantra, albeit wrong, has been that tax cuts reduce the deficit, it’s not hard to imagine there being further tax cuts emerging from the Super Committee. So at minimum, I was right about the lower bounds of the jobs pivot being at least 50% tax cuts. But this is just the proposal and what is passed (if anything passes) will likely look very different from what we heard last night. Obviously there’s plenty of time and space for the ostensible jobs bill to end up with an even greater majority going towards tax cuts.

The larger issue is that while I strongly support action around job creation (particularly in infrastructure spending and aid to states), the idea of paying for it by cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, let alone other federal social spending programs, is intensely unacceptable to me. While the President may have delivered the most forceful and passionate speech of his tenure in office, replete with genuine historical praise of past accomplishments of liberal governance, using it as a jumping off point for more deficit reduction and cuts to the social safety net is not only bizarre but dangerous. Cutting Medicare to save it is as intellectually honest and persuasive as bombing for peace or fucking for virginity. It just doesn’t work like that. And I can’t say playing the role of Cassandra makes me feel good, either.