Wealth & Money Quote by Cal Thomas

A familiar fiscal argument gets yanked to its ugliest logical endpoint. Cal Thomas isn’t calmly forecasting policy; he’s setting a moral tripwire. By pairing “pressure” with “eliminate,” he turns budget arithmetic into a threat narrative, suggesting that once a society starts treating Social Security as a “burden,” it’s only a short slide to treating certain people as disposable. The word choice is deliberate: “ease” sounds technocratic, “eliminate” sounds murderous. That whiplash is the point.

The subtext is a warning about utilitarian language in politics - the habit of ranking human worth by economic “contribution.” Thomas puts “free up,” “fit,” and “contribute” in scare quotes to indict the cold euphemisms that can sanitize cruelty. He’s arguing that when policymakers and pundits talk like accountants, vulnerable bodies become line items. The quote’s power comes from its escalation: it’s not saying today’s reformers are plotting euthanasia; it’s claiming their logic makes euthanasia thinkable.

Context matters. As a conservative columnist, Thomas is writing in an ecosystem that often frames entitlement programs as unsustainable and treats intergenerational conflict as inevitable. His intent is to re-moralize that debate, to shame cost-cutting rhetoric by tethering it to historical anxieties about eugenics and “lives not worth living.” It’s slippery-slope reasoning, sure, but it works as polemic because it forces readers to confront what gets hidden when “reform” is discussed as if the recipients are abstractions rather than citizens with claims on the collective.