Today, during a House floor debate on the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Adam Smith (D, WA) admitted that Democrats had cut Medicare. Smith said he knows they cut Medicare because of all the “ads bashing us for cutting Medicare back in 2010.”
Rep. Smith: “But number one is to protect our national security and the men and women who serve in the armed forces who have had to live with that government shutdown. those CRs, those threatened government shutdowns, and most importantly, those budget caps that the majority refuses to lift. Unless we lift those, the military is going to be in this situation in perpetuity, and that is unacceptable for our national security. It is all about national security, it is all about defense for why we are opposing this bill. We can’t go on like this and have an adequate national security. We have to lift the budget caps. And I’ll say one other thing, we have to raise taxes somewhere. In the last 14 years we’ve cut taxes by somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 trillion. Now, granted there’s unquestionably places in the budget we can cut and we’ve cut. I yield myself an additional two minutes. We’ve cut Medicare. I know we’ve cut Medicare because the Republican Party ran all kinds of ads bashing us for cutting Medicare back in 2010. We found about $700 billion in savings, that has extended the life of the program and saved money. So we have saved money. But the flat refusal to raise any revenue is what has got our military with a hand around its throat.”