To ward off a push for Social Security cuts in the next Congress, Democrats may need a bloc of Senate votes to prevent another bipartisan commission from trying to slash the program. This coming Tuesday, the issue of austerity is on the ballot in the Massachusetts Senate race as one of the candidates — Rep. Joe Kennedy III — once lauded a framework to cut Social Security and Medicare as “the right blueprint forward.”

In August 2012, just three years after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression up to that point, Kennedy was a first-time congressional candidate. During a debate hosted by the Martin Institute at Stonehill College, Kennedy told moderators that something had to be done about the debt and deficit and that the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan had gotten it more or less right. That plan — which came out of a White House commission touted by Vice President Joe Biden — proposed cuts to Social Security, along with Medicare and Medicaid.

“We’ve got a jobs crisis, and we’ve got a debt problem, and the number one issue has to be getting people back to work,” Kennedy told the moderator when asked what he thought about the plan. “Part of that challenge, though, is the uncertainty that businesses, individuals, corporations are facing with the current tax structure because so many businesses — it’s hard to ask government to say, ‘There’s hundreds of billions of dollars on the sideline, let’s get that back into the system,’ when they don’t know what the tax rate is going to be. The uncertainty out there is forcing all that money to be kept on the sideline.”