Social Security Works spoke to several conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this past Friday, who were none too pleased to hear Mitt Romney he plans to cut Social Security and Medicare.

The American people don’t subscribe to the conservative position about why our nation has a deficit. Most people blame our deficit not on excessive social spending but instead on low taxes for the rich or the huge military budget, according to this National Journal poll. Just because some people might be concerned about the deficit doesn’t mean they support the Republican party on the issue.

Our paranoid culture of rooting out fraud and our fear-mongering media that makes every anecdote a proof the system is corrupt, make it harder for people who need help to get it.

There are “three national pastimes” in Washington D.C., Brooks informed us: baseball, apple pie, and Congress raiding the Social Security Trust Fund. And the GOP just didn’t want to let that happen.

When the payroll tax was first proposed last year I thought it was an inherently bad idea. While the economy needed a stimulus, it should never have taken the form of messing with the basic social contract that is the foundation of our social safety net.

The GOP doesn’t seem to want to extend the payroll tax cut, because it might improve the economy a bit next year. But they cannot just come out and say that they want to tank the economy to make it easier for candidate Romney or Gingrich. So now they’re claiming to be worried about the effect on the Social Security Trust Fund.

Thomas Friedman bemoans the fact that President Obama hasn’t embraced the big cuts to Social Security and Medicare proposed by former senator Alan Simpson and Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles. Their plan is great if you think the country’s biggest problem is high-living seniors.

A couple days ago, Dick Durbin was confronted by constituents in Illinois and forced to take a position assuring protection of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Two days later, he offered to put “entitlements” on the table in exchange for phony GOP tax proposals that benefit the rich.

The growing “mob” of “thuggish” Olds are getting all up in America’s grill when there are important decisions to be made about destroying the social safety net as well as tearing up that agreement we made with them back in ’35, and then amended in ’39, where the Olds gave us money when they were Youngs and we agreed to keep it until they needed it. Well, a funny thing happened, and we kind of borrowed some of that money and blew it on candy and toys and wars and after-tax benefits to General Electric.

If there were ever any doubts that “Fox on 15th Street” was a fitting label for the Washington Post, Patrick Pexton, the paper’s ombudsman removed them with his defense of the Post’s front page piece on Social Security last Sunday. Just to remind readers, the whole premise of that piece, as expressed in its headline, is that Social Security has crossed some “treacherous milestone” because it had gone “cash negative earlier than expected.”

While this assertion was presented in a sensationalistic manner in the Post, as both the headline and the lead, it is actually not true. Social Security has not gone “cash negative” in the sense that the trust fund is still growing. While current benefit payments exceed designated Social Security tax revenue, the income to the system, which includes interest on its holdings of government bonds, still exceeds benefit payments.