Obama: Social Security

President Barack Obama Dept: Calling on Republicans to "come together around common sense and compromise," Obama said he did not want to reduce the deficit on "the backs of the middle class and the elderly.", according to CBC. The president's budget projects deficit reductions of $1.8 trillion over the next decade, achieved with higher taxes, reductions in payments to Medicare providers and cutbacks in the cost-of-living adjustments paid to millions of recipients in Social Security and other government programs and President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.8 trillion spending blueprint on Wednesday that strives to achieve a "grand bargain" to tame runaway deficits, raising taxes on the wealthy and trimming popular benefit programs including Social Security and Medicare. "If we are serious about deficit reduction, we have to be serious about tax reform," he said at a news conference at the White House on Wednesday morning. "There is no excuse to keep tax loopholes open...They don't grow our economy or get people back to work." (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.