Wealth & Money Quote by Bobby Scott

A politician doesn’t say “worry about Social Security” unless he’s trying to reorder the country’s anxiety. Bobby Scott’s line is a small act of agenda warfare: it grabs the most electorally radioactive program in American life and plants it at the top of the priority list, demoting the perennial Washington hobbyhorse of tax cuts to a distant “second.” The grammar does the heavy lifting. “Worry about” is deliberately plainspoken, almost parental, signaling stewardship rather than ideology. It frames Social Security not as a bargaining chip but as a responsibility with consequences for real people.

The subtext is a warning about tradeoffs. Scott is implicitly accusing tax-cut advocates of treating the federal budget like a magic trick: shrink revenue now, then later claim there’s no choice but to “reform” entitlements. In that sense, the sentence is less a policy memo than an attempt to expose a sequence Democrats have watched for decades: tax cuts first, panic about deficits second, cuts to the safety net third. By flipping the order, Scott tries to collapse that script.

Contextually, this fits the long-running fight over what fiscal seriousness is supposed to mean. Tax cuts can be sold as growth or freedom, but Social Security is sold as a promise. Scott’s intent is to make breaking that promise feel like the real radicalism, and to position himself on the side of continuity: pay the bills, protect retirees, then argue about the rest.