• In Florida, Biden assails Romney-Ryan ticket over Medicare, Social Security taxes

    By NBC's Carrie Dann

    BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Courting the over-65 set in retiree-rich southern Florida Friday, Vice President Joe Biden accused the GOP presidential ticket of planning to poach the Medicare and Social Security tax benefits of the middle class to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

    "If Governor Romney’s plan goes into effect, it could mean that everyone, everyone of you, would be paying more taxes on your Social Security," Biden told hundreds of retirees at the Century Village community in Boca Raton. "The average senior would have to pay $460 a year more in taxes for their Social Security."

    The Obama campaign traces that math to the claim that Romney's tax policy would necessarily require the elimination of some middle-class tax deductions. Using data from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, they determine that Romney would have to cut tax benefits for those earning under $200,000 by 58 percent. Spreading those cuts evenly across all benefits would work out to an average of $460 per year per senior.

    But Team Romney counters that those numbers are based on a third party's assessment that's riddled with uncertainties and  assumptions rather than Romney's actual plan, which the campaign promises on its website "will not raise [Social Security] taxes and will not affect today's seniors or those nearing retirement."

    Republicans also point out that Biden himself voted for a 1993 measure that expanded the taxable portion of Social Security benefits for many low-income seniors.

    In Florida Friday, Biden said Romney's tax plan was not "moral" because of what he claims would be unfair hikes on the middle class.

    "How can you justify a middle class that has been clobbered by the policies that brought on this great recession, adding taxes to them and drastically cutting taxes for the very wealthy," he told a group made up mostly of seniors in Tamarac. "It's not right, I don't even think it's moral, and beyond that it will not help the economy, it will hurt the economy."

    In slamming the GOP ticket, Biden also joked that he can't determine if Romney would actually roll back the Obama-backed health care plan after Romney's on-again off-again embrace of some of its core tenets.

    "He said 'well, we’re going to maybe ... do that, but I’d like to keep a lot of the good stuff,' and then his campaign says, 'no no no, he didn’t mean that,' " Biden said.

    The vice president, who also won laughs from the elderly crowds for jokes about his age and a Lawrence Welk shout-out that would have sailed over the heads of a younger audience, was warmly received at his campaign events. But he did face persistent questioning on the Obama administration's health care plan when he stopped at Nestor's, a Jewish deli in Boca Raton.

    Steve Grossman, a 39-year-old who said he worked in the financial services industry, approached Biden as he sat down to order a tuna salad platter and began asking about health insurance costs. The vice president initially seemed reluctant to answer, cutting Grossman off to order his food and to chat with another patron's husband on the phone, but he ended up offering a description of state-based health care exchanges more fitting for a think tank roundtable than a deli specializing in "the mother of all Pastrami sandwiches."

    "You can get more benefits for less money," he told Grossman in between slurps of chicken soup. "You get to choose among those insurance companies that are competing as part of the exchanges."

  • Biden guarantees: 'There will be no changes in Social Security'

    By Michael O'Brien, NBC News

     

    Updated 5:30 p.m. - Vice President Joe Biden told cafe patrons in Virginia on Tuesday that he could "guarantee" he and President Obama would allow no changes to Social Security.

    As a debate over reforming entitlements -- particularly Medicare -- takes center stage in the 2012 presidential campaign, Biden seemed to promise not to allow changes to the program.

    "Hey, by the way, let's talk about Social Security," Biden said after a diner at The Coffee Break Cafe in Stuart, VA expressed his relief that the Obama campaign wasn't talking about changing the popular entitlement program.

    "Number one, I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security," Biden said, per a pool report. "I flat guarantee you."

    The pool report noted that most of the patrons at the cafe toward whom Biden was directing his remarks were over the age of 60.

    The vice president's language almost hearkens back to some 2011 tough talk by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who vowed not to take up changes to Social Security for another two decades, by which time he might not even be a senator anymore.

    "Two decades from now, I'm willing to take a look at it, but I'm not willing to take a look at it right now," Reid said at the time in an interview on MSNBC. "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."

    Mitt Romney has expressed an interest in gradually raising the retirement age, as well as means-testing benefits for the wealthy, but he otherwise hasn't specified his own Social Security proposals.

  • Romney draws on 2010 playbook in Medicare offensive

    By Michael O'Brien, NBC News

     

    Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney and his newly-named running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, have made clear that they are doing more than defending their proposed changes to Medicare.

    They’re welcoming the debate.

    "President Obama is actually damaging Medicare for current seniors. It's irrefutable," Ryan told Fox News in an interview set to air this evening. "And that's why I think this is a debate we want to have, and that's a debate we're going to win."

    That's a charge echoed in a new television ad released Tuesday by the Romney campaign, which charges the president with cutting $716 billion from Medicare at the expense of current retirees. (These cuts, which were enacted through health care reform, are largely used to pay for the costs of the new health reform law.)

    Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

    Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign rally at American Energy Corportation on August 14 in Beallsville, Ohio.

    The Romney campaign's newfound eagerness to engage President Obama on Medicare appears to draw more from Republicans' 2010 playbook than anything else.

    But the strategy raises the question: Can it work -- again -- after Republicans passed the Ryan budget plan in 2011 and 2012?

    Reince Priebus, Chairman of the RNC, joins The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd to talk about Mitt Romney's messaging plan for the GOP Convention and the medicare debate taking place on the 2012 field.

    The Romney campaign has gambled that it will.

    "You see, when he ran for office he said he’d protect Medicare, but did you know that he has taken $716 billion out of the Medicare trust fund – he’s raided that trust fund – and you know what he did with it? He’s used it to pay for Obamacare – a risky, unproven, federal government takeover of health care," Romney said Tuesday in Ohio. "And if I’m president of the United States we’re putting the $716 billion back."

    Going on offense against Obama -- even with a strategy that is now two years old -- might prove to be the best way for Romney to defray the inevitable attacks he invited by adding Ryan, the GOP budget guru, to the ticket.

    But arguably the most significant shift in the debate over entitlements during the last two years came in the form of two budgets authored by Ryan in his capacity as chairman of the House Budget Committee. Those proposals call for major changes to Medicare, principally by transforming it into a voucher (or "premium support") program for future retirees who are currently under the age of 55.

    Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter joins Andrea Mitchell Reports to discuss Medicare and Joe Biden's comments which have drawn criticism from Republicans.

    "The truth is that the Romney-Ryan budget would end Medicare as we know it: people with Medicare would be left with nothing but a voucher in place of the guaranteed benefits they rely on today," said Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith. "And they do it all to pay for massive tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires – the very same top-down economic scheme that crashed our economy and devastated the middle class in the first place."

    Clouding the matter, though, is Romney's apparent disavowal of elements of Ryan's own plan, despite having previously said that he would sign the Ryan budget into law if it were the plan Congress were to send him.

    For instance, Ryan's budget proposals leave in place the $716 billion of cuts to Medicare that Romney has vowed to restore.

    The presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign has made clear since Saturday, when Romney formally named Ryan as his running mate, that the two budgets authored by Ryan during his time at the budget committee don’t fully represent Romney’s views.

    The candidate himself made that much clear on Monday, when he told reporters in Florida that his own plan for Medicare is “very similar” to Ryan’s, though not exactly the same.

    “We haven’t gone through piece by piece and said, ‘Oh, here’s a place where there’s a difference,’” he said, explaining that he couldn’t immediately recall an area of explicit difference.

    Former Gov. John Sununu responds to criticism from the Obama campaign about Paul Ryan and his economic vision.

    Romney's website saysthat his plan "almost precisely mirrors" a proposal put forward by Ryan and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, which would move forward with a premium support plan, but allow future retirees to maintain existing Medicare benefits as an alternative option, but in competition with private plans and with premium levels meant to cover its costs.

    But Romney and Ryan, so far, haven't emphasized this alternative, relying instead upon criticizing Obama's own cuts to Medicare.

    NBC's Alex Moe contributed