I'm waiting to see how Mitt Romney walks any of this back once the general election begins if he ends up winning the Republican presidential nomination because I don't see how his statements tonight on Social Security and Medicare are going to help him with seniors later on, no matter how many times he reiterates that the cuts won't affect current recipients or those over fifty five years of age. During this Monday night's Republican debate Romney apparently thinks that seniors don't care what happens to their children or grandchildren.

Romney was asked what he would do in regards to Social Security and Medicare and he started things out with one of the Republican zombie lies out there, that President Obama cut $500 billion from Medicare. Mother Jones has more on why that's just not true here — Return of the Big GOP Medicare Lie.

He also fully endorsed raising the eligibility ages for both Social Security and Medicare, endorsed Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare, means testing which turns the programs into welfare programs and block-granting Medicaid back to the states. He also seemed to completely contradict himself within the time frame of a few minutes with his follow up a little later in the debate when he said "we simply can't say we're going to go out and borrow more money to let people set up new accounts to take money away from Social Security and Medicare today." Just what does he think those "voluntary" accounts are going to do to future benefit recipients? It's bad enough the man flip flops on every issue, he couldn't even get his talking points straight within a sentence of each other.

Sadly the awful policies he was promoting here rather than raising taxes on the wealthy and raising the income cap on payroll taxes and curbing the cost of health insurance by moving to a single payer program are not anything that either interests or is supported by his fellow Republican primary contenders, or the hapless moderators asking the questions during the debate.