Michael Hudson has the article Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.

Writing down debts reduces the overall economy’s financial costs. Keeping debts on the books retains these costs. So when the financial sector (or the 1%) insists on maintaining the debts that have been run up – and supporting the debt-leveraged price of real estate pledged as collateral – securing its past “savings” gains are incompatible with maintaining a viable economy. The debt overhead becomes an expense that must be shed if the economy is not to shrink – and if it does shrink, more debts will go bad and a deteriorating spiral will set in.

Perception of this long-term macroeconomic dynamic is what has led the past few centuries of legal trends and political ideology to favor indebted labor and industry, and indebted governments as well. It explains why debtors’ prisons have been closed, and bankruptcy laws become increasingly humanitarian to enable debtors to make a fresh start. This idea of clean slates is only recently being extended to the economy-wide scale, starting with government debts to global creditors.

Today’s financial trend threatens to reverse this pro-debtor reform tendency.

I had been looking for the origins of the phrase that is the title of this article, and this is one of the items that I came across. I don’t think this phrase was originated by Michael Hudson, but the article is a good treatise on the subject.

YouTube has the video Bernie Exposes Weaselly GOP Plan To Cut Medicare & Social Security.

He does play the video of Bernie’s debate on the Senate floor. However, if you need Bernie Sanders explained to you, this guy does a good job. There was one subtlety that he explains that did get by me at first. That was the one about Rubio and his mother. (Rubio will make sure he doesn’t upset his mother who receives Social Security, but the younger people will get screwed.)

Remember that Social Security and Medicare are an earned benefit. They are not entitlements. If the workers got their fair share of the benefits of productivity improvements in the economy, there would be no problem paying for the benefits they earned.