Earlier this month, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) neatly summed up the Republican platform for 2012, declaring that Americans must "come to grips with the fact that promises have been made that frankly are not going to be kept for many." Yesterday at the Reagan Library, Tea Party darling and GOP rock star Marco Rubio explained why his party wants to break the promises Americans made to each other when it comes to safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security. Despite their proven success in dramatically reducing poverty among the elderly, Senator Rubio (R-FL) charged "these programs actually weakened us as a people."
Just months after joining 235 House Republicans and 39 other GOP Senators in voting to privatize and ration the Medicare system currently providing health insurance for 46 million American seniors, the emerging number one choice to get the number two slot on the 2012 GOP ticket made the case that the program made us lazy. As Rubio explained to Nancy Reagan and the audience at her late husband's presidential library:

"These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another. If someone was sick in your family, you took care of them. If a neighbor met misfortune, you took care of them. You saved for your retirement and your future because you had to. We took these things upon ourselves in our communities, our families, and our homes, and our churches and our synagogues. But all that changed when the government began to assume those responsibilities. All of a sudden, for an increasing number of people in our nation, it was no longer necessary to worry about saving for security because that was the government's job."

Leave aside for the moment that virtually every working American contributes payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. As this chart shows, the passage of Medicare in 1965 helped cut the staggering poverty rate among America's seniors by two-thirds:

ThinkProgress offered the young Florida Senator a quick history lesson:

Prior to Medicare's enactment in 1965, "about one-half of America's seniors did not have hospital insurance," "more than one in four elderly were estimated to go without medical care due to cost concerns," and one in three seniors were living in poverty. Today, nearly all seniors have access to affordable health care and only about 14 percent of seniors are below the poverty line.

And as a report by the Washington Post detailed last month, the Republican plan to Medicare as we know it would almost certainly return millions of future elderly Americans to poverty and the ranks of the uninsured:

Yet several of the most prominent solutions under discussion largely derive their savings by shifting a greater share of the cost onto beneficiaries. The Republican plan sponsored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and passed by the House of Representatives in April, for instance, would substantially reduce federal spending on Medicare by capping the government's contribution to the program and transforming it into a system of "premium supports" granted to seniors to partially subsidize their purchase of private insurance plans, with seniors responsible for any additional costs. This would more than double out-of-pocket health-care spending by a typical senior to $12,500 per year, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.
And the ability of many seniors to shoulder that burden appears questionable. Only 5 percent of Medicare beneficiaries have incomes of $80,000 or above, a figure that includes any income from a spouse. As for the 47 percent who are at or close to poverty, on average they are already spending nearly a fourth of their budgets on health care, according to an analysis of Medicare survey data by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

As the CBO explained in its April analysis of the Ryan GOP budget, by 2030 the beneficiary's share of health care costs would be a staggering 68 percent.
That is what can fairly be called a "broken promise." But Marco Rubio had a different description for it. "Conservatism," Rubio announced," is about empowering people to catch up." Or to put the GOP's plan for shredding the American social safety net in one word: "compassion."