Hey, disabled people? The Republicans have their sights set on your next

First they came for the elderly. Now they're coming for the disabled:

Future Social Security retirement benefits for disabled workers is a matter for negotiations with Congress as it drafts solvency legislation, the Bush administration said Thursday, declining to say whether they should be raised, lowered or left unchanged.

"Any plan that maintains current disability benefits will need to address the transition to retirement, and those details will be worked out through the legislative process," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.

Under Social Security, disabled workers qualify for a benefit until they reach retirement age. At that point, in a bookkeeping move, Social Security switches them to a retirement benefit of the same amount.

President Bush has long said he wants to maintain the existing disability benefit structure.

At the same time, he has spoken favorably of a solvency plan that would curtail the growth of retirement benefits for middle-income and higher-income workers of the future.

That leaves open the issue of future retirement benefits for disabled workers.

Duffy said the administration is not proposing to adjust future retirement benefits for the disabled in the same way as it wants them changed for the non-disabled. "Those two populations will be treated differently," he said.

At the same time, he declined to say there would be no change.

Don't be bamboozled by talk of "low-income" people. The main focus of the Administration and Congressional Republicans is to turn Social Security into a welfare program in order to gain support for eliminating it entirely. They haven't forgotten the middle-class resentment against the "welfare queens" made famous by Ronald Reagan. Under Republican administrations, as the middle class gets squeezed, their resentment comes not at the expense of the wealthy, the ranks of whom they still delude themselves they can join if they just work hard enough, but at the poor. Republicans know this, and since they've been unsuccessful in selling the "stock market investments will make you rich" meme, they're now relying on class war.

What's sad is that it'll probably work.