Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, attacked the Social Security benefit cut proposals in President Obama’s budget Wednesday — breaking with the rest of the GOP leadership. As House Speaker John Boehner, House Republican Leader Eric Cantor, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell embraced the chained CPI provisions, Walden called them a “shocking attack on seniors.”

Walden told CNN:

I’ll tell you, when you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taking $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare and now coming back at seniors again, I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here, in terms of denying access to seniors for health care in districts like mine certainly and around the country. I think he’s going to have a lot of pushback from some of the major senior organizations on this and Republicans as well.

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Though prominent conservatives were quick to pounce on Walden, his spokesman stood by the comments. He told Politico that even though the rest of the GOP leadership disgagrees, Walden “believes it’s wrong to cut benefits for seniors to pay for more wasteful spending.”

Though outside groups spent millions in the 2012 campaign repeating the false claim, the accusation that Obamacare somehow stole $716 billion from Medicare has been widely debunked. What’s more, the Paul Ryan House Republican budget — which Walden supports — relies on the same savings.

While there are legitimate reasons to worry about the chained CPI proposals, Walden’s desire to protect Social Security seems new-found. In 2005, when President George W. Bush proposed a risky privatization scheme in his State of the Union address, Walden raised no objections and praised speech as a “bold agenda, proposing solutions to some of American’s most difficult problems.” Seven years before, Walden told Project Vote Smart he supported a plan to “invest Social Security’s assets collectively in stocks and bonds instead of U.S. Treasury securities.”

During a contentious panel on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) found himself at odds with his fellow panelists — and with the facts — about Social Security’s solvency.

Johnson and fellow panelist Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) had been discussing the long-term solvency of Social Security when Johnson made the claim that the Social Security Trust Fund was a myth, and that the revenue generated from the sale of securities to the federal government somehow should not count in calculating the program’s fiscal health.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman jumped in to point out that Johnson was unwilling to accept even the most basic facts over the way Social Security is funded, all for the sake of a talking point:

KRUGMAN: You said ‘let’s start with the facts,’ but we’ve just run aground right there.

JOHNSON: Exactly my point, we have got to agree on the facts and figures.

KRUGMAN: But your facts are false…Social Security has a dedicated revenue base, it has a trust fund based on that dedicated revenue base. You can’t change the rules mid stream and say ‘oh, suddenly the trust fund doesn’t count.’ [...] It’s important to realize that the facts that are being brought out here are in fact non-facts.

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The Social Security trust fund is solvent through 2038, and the program would almost certainly have long-term solvency were it not for the Republican-backed cap on payroll taxes for income above a certain level.

While the richest Americans have fared well during the sluggish economic recovery, most Americans continue to struggle with falling wages and job uncertainty. According to a new report from the Conference Board, 62 percent of workers between 45 and 60 plan to delay their retirements, a stark jump from 2010 when 42 percent of workers planned a delay.

Job loss, financial loss, and a lower salary caused many workers to reshape their future plans:

Right now, more than half of middle class workers are expected to outlive their retirement savings, as pension plans have declined dramatically. Unfortunately, Republicans’ answer to the financial difficulties for two-thirds of Americans has been to propose raising Social Security and Medicare eligibility to age 70.

The Business Roundtable, a group representing the CEOs of the largest corporations in the nation — including the biggest banks, retailers, and insurance companies — is calling to raise the retirement age to 70. The group argues that Social Security is no longer affordable and plans to lobby Congressional lawmakers and the administration for its plan:

An influential group of business CEOs is pushing a plan to gradually increase the full retirement age to 70 for both Social Security and Medicare and to partially privatize the health insurance program for older Americans. [...]

“America can preserve the health and retirement safety net and rein in long-term spending growth by modernizing Medicare and Social Security in a way that addresses America’s new fiscal and demographic realities,” said Gary Loveman, chairman, president and chief executive of casino giant Caesars Entertainment Corp.

Loveman, who chairs the Business Roundtable’s health and retirement committee, said the business leaders will be meeting with members of Congress and the administration to press them to enact their plan.

CEO’s representing an organization called “Fix the Debt” have made the same argument. But the idea that Social Security is unaffordable for future generations is nonsense. The program can pay full benefits for decades, and nearly full benefits after that, with literally no changes. Minor tweaks — such as raising the payroll tax cap — can render the program solvent for three-quarters of a century. Social Security is also statutorily barred from adding to the federal deficit.

It’s particularly galling for wealthy CEOs to call for raising the retirement age, as they are among those who will be least affected by the change. Average CEO pay for S&P 500 companies is nearly $13 million. Recent increases in life expectancy have only benefited wealthier workers in non-physical jobs. Poorer workers doing physical labor have not seen the same gains and would be most hurt by an increase in the retirement age.

In an interview Monday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) confirmed that Congressional Republicans plan again to use the upcoming debt limit to hold the nation hostage to their demands for massive cuts to Medicare and Social Security. His comments echoed earlier remarks by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and anti-government activist Grover Norquist.

Raising the debt ceiling does not mean spending more money — it merely allows the administration to take out the necessary debt to pay for the spending already authorized by Congress and the interest on the debt that has already been approved by Congresses past. While the nation reached the current debt limit yesterday, the Department of the Treasury is using accounting measures to keep the government from default for the next couple of months.

But McCain told CNN that Republicans would again block legislation to keep the nation from defaulting on its obligations, unless they can force major cuts to vital entitlement programs — even though doing so would be highly unpopular:

WOLF BLITZER (HOST): Are you going to use the raising of the debt ceiling in February or March, Senator McCain, as leverage to get what you want from the president?

McCAIN: I think there’s gonna be a whole new field of battle [laughs] when the debt ceiling rolls around. Most of us have pledged that we’re gonna have to… before we vote again to address the debt ceiling — even though it may be at great political cost — we’ve got to address spending, and that means entitlements. We’ve got to sit down together and get us back on a path… look, we just added, what was it, $2.1 trillion in the last increase in the debt ceiling, and spending continues to go up. I think there’s gonna be a pretty big showdown the next time around when we go to the debt [limit].

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Ironically, McCain was among those most critical of phantom Medicare “cuts” in the Obamacare legislation, calling reductions in the program “a price that Americans should not be asked to pay.”

But now, McCain and other Republicans are making it clear: either programs protecting the health and financial solvency of American seniors must be significantly cut — or they will thrust the nation into an economic calamity unheard of since the Great Depression.

Although official Washington is currently fixated on the so-called “Fiscal Cliff,” the biggest threat to American prosperity is the debt ceiling, which must be raised in February to prevent economic catastrophe. If Republicans refuse to reach a deal on the so-called cliff, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that they will spark a new recession in 2013. But if Republicans block action on the debt ceiling, they will make that potential recession look quaint. Without raising the debt ceiling, the United States will be forced to embrace austerity so severe it will lead to “a bigger GDP drop than that experienced during the Great Recession of 2008.”

But in an interview on Fox News Sunday this morning, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) threatened to oppose this must-pass bill unless Social Security benefits are taken away from millions of future retirees:

I’m not going to raise the debt ceiling unless we get serious about keeping the country from becoming Greece, saving Social Security and Medicare [sic]. So here’s what i would like: meaningful entitlement reform — not to turn Social Security into private accounts, not to take a voucher approach to Medicare — but, adjust the age for Social Security, CPI changes and means testing and look beyond the ten-year window. I cannot in good conscience raise the debt ceiling without addressing the long term debt problems of this country and I will not.

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This is extortion, plain and simple. It is the budgetary equivalent of threatening to break America’s legs unless Congress agrees to break the backs of millions poised on the edge of retirement. Graham’s position is that seniors should have to wait longer for their retirement benefits — even if they work in physically demanding jobs that literally tear the body apart by the time a worker reaches age 65 — and that those benefits should be reduced in the future.

And if Congress won’t agree to this deal, then Graham is prepared to thrust the nation into an economic calamity unheard of since the Great Depression.

Two Republican senators want to use the threat of an economic meltdown to raise the retirement age and cut Medicare. Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) introduced a plan today that would raise the federal debt limit by $1 trillion in exchange for $1 trillion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, as The Hill reported:

The Corker-Alexander dollar-for-dollar plan has several components.

It would structurally reform Medicare by creating competing private options giving seniors greater choice of healthcare plans. It would not, however, cap Medicare spending.

The plan would also give states more flexibility to manage Medicaid programs and prevent states from “gaming the federal share of the program with state tax charges.”

It would gradually raise the Social Security retirement age and use the “chained CPI” formula to calculate cost-of-living adjustments, curbing the growing cost of benefits.

In exchange, it would direct the debt limit be increased by the same amount as the savings generated from entitlement reform.

The U.S. will hit its debt limit on or around December 31st. The Treasury Department estimates that, using extraordinary measures, it could avoid default for another two months or so. Allowing the U.S. to default on its debt via not raising the debt ceiling could cause a complete financial meltdown. The 2011 debt ceiling debacle — during which House Republicans nearly pushed the country into a default due to their intransigence on taxes — cost the country about $19 billion in higher interest payments and at least one million jobs.

Corker and Alexander are threatening more economic chaos in order to achieve one of the most regressive potential policy changes. Though lawmakers point to America’s increasing life expectancy in order to justify raising the retirement age, life expectancy is only increasing for wealthier workers in non-physical jobs. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research put it, “there has been a sharp rise in inequality in life expectancy by income over the last three decades that mirrors the growth in inequality in income.”