After last week’s market turmoil, Barack Obama tried to scare seniors in Florida by telling them that John McCain’s privatization ideas for Social Security would have left them broke.
Fact Check dismantled this attack as either completely ignorant or a total fabrication, but Slate noticed something amiss on Team Obama’s website on Social Security. Did Obama launch a false attack to distract from a retreat on his own position?
First, the lie:
In Daytona Beach, Obama said that “if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week.” He referred to “elderly women” at risk of poverty, and said families would be scrambling to support “grandmothers and grandfathers.”
That’s not true. The plan proposed by President Bush and supported by McCain in 2005 would not have allowed anyone born before 1950 to invest any part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. All current retirees would be covered by the same benefits they are now. …
In our “Scaring Seniors” article posted Sept. 19 we took apart a claim in an Obama-Biden ad that McCain somehow supported a 50 percent cut in Social Security benefits, which is simply false. Then, on Saturday Sept. 20, Sen. Barack Obama personally fed senior citizens another whopper, this one a highly distorted claim about the private Social Security accounts that McCain supports.
Hot Air Blog Archive Obama’s lie on Social Security: a cover for a retreat?
The lies continue from Obama