Top newspapers play into Social Security scaremongering

Top Newspapers Play Into Social Security Scaremongering

An article in the New York Times last week announced, “Obama Promises Bid to Overhaul Retiree Spending.” The Washington Post responded this week with “Obama Pledges Entitlement Reform,” also splashed across the front page.This is reading a lot into Obama’s vague answers to reporters’ questions about entitlement programs, first at a press conference to introduce his new Chief Performance Officer, Nancy Killefer, and later in a conversation with the Post editorial board.

At the press conference, Obama didn’t mention these programs in his prepared remarks about making government more efficient. Even when a Wall Street Journal reporter asked a loaded question about Medicare and Social Security (“Budget experts, as you know, agree that the real key to controlling federal spending lies with the entitlement programs…”) Obama offered boilerplate language about the federal deficit writ large, calling these programs “a central part” of these discussions as an afterthought (listen to the full transcript here). Buried in the Post article, which should really have been titled “Obama Pays Courtesy Visit to Post Poobahs,” the Post acknowledged that “Obama was careful not to outline specific fixes for Social Security and Medicare, refusing to endorse either a new blue-ribbon commission or the concept of submitting an overhaul plan to Congress that would be subject only to an up-or-down vote…”

http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/top_newspapers_play_into_social_security_scaremongering/

nothing new.
At least thirty years ago people my age (I'm 60 now) have been saying there won't be any social security around when they retire. I said then, and I say now that's nonsense. First of all, all along the way claims of when the system might run out of money never match what the GAO projects. Secondly, does anyone really believe that we won't dip into general revenues for ss? Heck, all we have to do is divert some relatively small fraction of the money being funneled to the cluster fuck in Iraq and ss will be solvent forever.

Military spending is seen as an entitlement, but just not labeled that way.

And I don't call SS or medicare entitlements. I call them insurance programs. The entitlement label as been too demonized.

:hi:

Either way, be ready to defend them cause the war pigs are coming. The Pentagon wants more money and there's only one place to get it.

equals that of the rest of the world combined. And a significant portion of "the rest of the world" are our allies. The current scale of our military spending is a tribute to media-induced paranoia that is palmed off as patriotism. The violent collision between the real needs of the American people and those of the military-industrial complex is inevitable. Time to slaughter some pigs.

The Washington Post regularly editorializes for cuts in Social Security benefits. It also routinely makes untrue statements in its news article about the state of the program that have the effect of undermining confidence in it. It did so yet again today with a front page story that told readers, "beginning in 2011, Social Security will take in less revenue than it pays out and will be forced to dip into reserves to pay benefits."

This is wrong, the program is projected by the Trustees to take in more money in tax revenue than it pays in benefits until 2017. The Congressional Budget Office puts this date at 2020.

Of course being "forced to dip into reserves" is not a problem for the program. The reason that the program built up a huge stock of reserves (more than $2 trillion) was to defray the cost of the baby boomers retirement. We over-taxed workers for the last quarter century precisely so that we would have reserves to tap when the baby boomers retired.

--Dean Baker

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=01&year=2009&base_name=the_washington_post_merges_its#112206

movement to badger Obama to do what Cheney and Bush failed to do. Privatization of SS failed. It would not surprise me if the campaigns continue. Getting Dems to do it would please them. We take the blame.

Greed was their motive.

The greatest risk to SS and other programs is unemployment.

The media are deflecting from the real problem - a crappy economy with massive job losses - (guess where funding for those entitlements comes from).

Obama promised 2 million new jobs in the first few years? If I am wrong about that please correct me. But 2.5 million jobs were lost just in 2008. There are 140,000 new workers each month. Try the math......

2 million new jobs won't hack it. That 2.66 trillion surplus in the Social Security trust funds at the end of 2008 will evaporate if the economy and especially unemployment aren't fixed.

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/fyOps.html

Deflections by the media work but maybe not as they intended. The new administration and Congress will screw with those entitlements at great risk to their uh, legacies.

And I have to point out that by killing the old people they will lose the rest of their readers. But apparently they just don't care. I suspect it's their love of the EMPIRE. They'll do anything to save it including throwing millions of seniors into poverty. The Washington Consensus, save the Empire, save "freemarket capitalism"..

mean I'm frigging entitled to get my money back out of there. I could have used that cash all these long decades, so I want it back.

TWO: I don't want Obama touching SS anymore than I wanted bush** to mess with it.

....We all have paid into this old age insurance policy all our working lives. We are entitled to the proceeds we have earned.

instead of talking of "reform" or "modifying" the program... IMO

Back in 2005, Thom Hartmann wrote a book review (Greenspan's Fraud by Ravi Batra) in which he laid out, IMO, very clearly how Social Security got hijacked by Reagan and Greenspan, and EVERY prez since... including Clinton, and unfortunately, probably Obama...

http://www.buzzflash.com/hartmann/05/07/har05007.html

Only Al Gore talked about and was ridiculed for the concept of the "lock box" for the SSTF...

The thing that has always stuck with me from that review is this line..

<snip>
Later, Senator Rick Santorum made an odd admission for a Republican: ""You can't pay benefits with IOUs," he said on the Senate floor. "You have to pay it with cash."

And where will that cash - now nearly two trillion dollars - come from over the next decades as Boomers begin to retire?

Technically (and legally) it's simple - the Social Security Trust Fund will give back its IOUs to the Treasury Department and in exchange for them get cash to pay the Boomers' retirement checks. Practically, though, it'll be a crisis of biblical proportions. In order for the Treasury to come up with that kind of cash will require either massive tax increases or increased massive borrowing - at a time when we're already borrowing so heavily that China is propping up our economy with weekly loans.

Thus, Bush talks about a "crisis" in Social Security with some accuracy. But he doesn't dare tell us what the real "crisis" is, or how Reagan and Greenspan set it up, because when it becomes widely known that the real crisis is that Reagan set the course to steal Boomers' Social Security savings, it will destroy the reputation of both supply-side economics and the Republican Party for generations to come.
<end>

To me this implies that technically and legally this money (the IOUs) must be paid back... otherwise.. it's theft on a scale even bigger than the bailout... (2 TRILLION in 2005..!!!!)

While there is always talk of "reform", there is absolutely no talk of the government meeting it's legal obligation to pay back the money it has already taken from the SSTF lockbox...

I've tried calling Thom Hartmann's show on Friday's to ask Sen. Bernie Sanders about this, but it's nearly impossible to get through in a timely fashion, and letters to my Senator (Akaka) and Rep. (Hirono) have been met with dead silence...

:shrug:

Anyway, raising the cap (per Edwards and Hartmann), paying back on the IOUs, and putting the SSTF in a secure "lockbox" (per Al Gore) would be real, positive reform, IMO...

Mahalo (thank you) for letting me vent...

:hi:

Thanks for sharing it. I'm not sure I'll read Ravi Batra's book but I love the review. We need to get this "out there".

to overlook when talking of dismantling Social Security, and that is the genuine poverty that most elderly endured prior to its enactment. Very few had pensions. Many people worked literally until they died. I recall my own grandparents subsisting on a very tiny pension, all the while living with an aunt and uncle. Guess we just need to plan to go back to those conditions.