On its Sunday front-page, the Washington Post published an incredibly dishonest attack on Social Security.

Under the headline, "Social Security Adding Billions to U.S. Budget Woes," reporter Lori Montgomery reported that "Social Security passed a treacherous milestone"--a moment where the program, largely because of the recession, spent more in benefits than it took in.

What does this mean? Montgomery tells readers: "Social Security is sucking money out of the Treasury."

Montgomery complains that "fixing Social Security has largely vanished from the conversation" about the country's fiscal crisis, and politicians are "ducking the issue." She adds: "Many Democrats have largely chosen to ignore the shortfall, insisting the program is flush."

This is the kind of language one might expect in an editorial, where papers are normally free to take a position on an issue under debate. Here the Post is declaring in a news piece that politicians who do not believe Social Security is in a crisis are wrong.

Montgomery singles out Democratic Sen. Harry Reid for a fact check:

In an MSNBC interview, he added: "Social Security does not add a single penny, not a dime, a nickel, a dollar to the budget problems we have. Never has and, for the next 30 years, it won’t do that."

Such statements have not been true since at least 2009, when the cost of monthly checks regularly began to exceed payroll tax collections.

Economist Dean Baker weighed in at his Beat the Press blog (his takedown of the Post's propaganda is a must-read):

Of course Senator Reid is exactly right. The system is self-financed under the law. In 2009 it began drawing on the interest on the government bonds it held. That is exactly what the law dictates, when Social Security needs more money than it collects in taxes, it is supposed to draw on the bonds that were purchased with Social Security taxes in the past. This means it is self-financing.

Anyone in the mood for factchecking at the Post might want to focus less on Reid and more on their own reporter. Here Montgomery tries to argue that people get more out of Social Security than they put in:

The average worker spends 20 years drawing benefits. A quarter will see their 90th birthday.

As a result, the average retirees have gotten back far more in federal benefits than they paid into the system during their working life, according to research by Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. That return is diminishing, in part because people today have paid more into the system than previous generations. But a two-earner, middle-income couple retiring this year can expect to get $913,000 in Social Security and Medicare benefits over their lifetimes, in return for $717,000 in payroll taxes.

Did you catch that? Montgomery switches gears from talking about Social Security to talking about the media's favorite underfunded safety net program, SocialSecurityandMedicare. Why? Because the research she's citing shows that the couple in question pays in more than it receives in benefits.

People who read the Washington Post know this--from a January 3, 2011, piece about this Urban Institute report:

The same hypothetical couple retiring in 2011 will have paid $614,000 in Social Security taxes, and can expect to collect $555,000 in benefits. They will have paid about 10 percent more into the system than they are likely to get back.

Montgomery needs readers to know that there are no politics involved here: "No crystal ball is necessary to predict Social Security’s future. Hard numbers tell the story." That's a pretty rich assertion coming from someone who's writing such a dishonest article.

Somewhat unhelpfully, deep into the article readers are told:

Social Security can pay full benefits through 2036. Once the trust fund is depleted, the system would rely solely on incoming taxes, and benefits would have to be cut by about 25 percent across the board.

Well that doesn't sound like much of a crisis anymore, unless you believe the money in the trust fund won't be paid back to taxpayers. Which is what Montgomery seems to be warning, since the alternatives are apparently so dire:

The $2.6 trillion Social Security trust fund will provide little relief. The government has borrowed every cent and now must raise taxes, cut spending or borrow more heavily from outside investors to keep benefit checks flowing.

As Baker pointed out, this process is exactly what the government does when someone redeems bonds. The challenge for Social Security bashers is to turn these events into a crisis--and demand that citizens accept the idea that the government should not pay them back what they are owed.

A New York Times story today (10/28/11) by Jennifer Steinhauer on the state of bipartisanship in Washington noted:

Outside of a few recent flashes of light--the passage of three trade bills this month, and an agreement on patent reform--there have been no big bipartisan jobs initiatives in this Congress.

The idea that trade deals with Colombia and South Korea are "big" job creators is not a fact--it's an argument that proponents of the deals make. But a corporate media that gives a thumbs-up to anything labeled "free trade" are going to be just as eager to call these deals job creators.

As Janine Jackson noted in a recent article in Extra!, the media didn't seem interested in evaluating the job creation numbers peddled by the deal's promoters, who were claiming 70,000 jobs would be created by the Korea agreement. According to Public Citizen, the deal could result in a net loss of jobs.

The story with patent reform is similar--lawmakers make spectacular claims about the jobs that are going to be created, while critics suggest the effect will be minor.

The New York Times has a fascinating new poll out today (10/26/11); too bad the paper doesn't emphasize the most newsworthy findings.

The headline is:

New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of Government

That's based on the poll's finding that the public doesn't have much faith in government.  But paragraph four offers a more striking finding:

With nearly all Americans remaining fearful that the economy is stagnating or deteriorating further, two-thirds of the public said that wealth should be distributed more evenly in the country. Seven in 10 Americans think the policies of congressional Republicans favor the rich. Two-thirds object to tax cuts for corporations and a similar number prefer increasing income taxes on millionaires.

So the public favors--by a substantial margin--greater income redistribution and higher taxes on the super-wealthy. And they oppose cutting taxes on corporations.

Perhaps the unwillingness of the government to do those things contributes to public distrust of that government.

When he's not sharing his thoughts about Barack Obama's birth certificate, Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is apparently unveiling a tax plan. It's a flat tax, with a few other details explained by the Washington Post (10/26/11):

Perry also would reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent; eliminate taxes on dividends and capital gains; make deep, unspecified cuts in federal spending; and establish individual retirement accounts outside the Social Security system.

The article, by Karen Tumulty, gets approving quotes from a Republican adviser and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. But it also says this, in the reporter's own voice:

The proposal would be a boon to the wealthiest Americans, and that is one reason why previous flat-tax proposals, though appealing in their simplicity, have never gone far politically.

Indeed. If there's one thing that doesn't go far politically, it's tax policy that favors the wealthy.

Conservative writer/commentator David Frum--the man responsible for writing the Bush "axis of evil" speech--has been doing left/right debates for the public radio show Marketplace.

Until now, that is.

This week (Marketplace, 10/12/11), Frum came to the conclusion that while he's still conservative, he doesn't do a good job representing the right-wing position in that kind of  discussion anymore:

Well, we've been doing a point/counterpoint here between me and Bob Reich for a couple of years. And it's been a lot of fun. I've certainly learned a lot from it. But I think that there's a kind of expectation that when you do it, that you represent the broad point of view of your half of the political spectrum. And although I consider myself a conservative and a Republican, and I think that the right-hand side of the spectrum has the better answers for the long-term growth of economy--low taxes, restrained government, less regulation--it's pretty clear that facing the immediate crisis--very intense crisis--I'm just not representing the view of most people who call themselves Republicans and conservatives these days.

Good for Frum.

Now if only some of the people who are booked on corporate TV to represent "the left" would do the same.

The country is on the brink of bankruptcy, Fox host Bill O'Reilly warned last night--all because Barack Obama is spending too much money. Drastic cuts are required, but "the far-left loons want to spend more."

And he's got the number to prove it:

In 2007, during the Bush administration, federal deficit spending was $161 billion, despite the Iraq and Afghan wars. Four years later under President Obama, the deficit spending is $1.3 trillion, eight times as much.

To be fair, the economy collapsed on Bush's watch, and both Republicans and Democrats committed almost a trillion dollars to prop up the economy. As we all know, the stimulus spending did not work very well.

But the Obama administration has not cut back. Today the feds are spending $9.8 billion every day. That breaks down to $410 million per hour. Tax revenue has actually gone up. It's 21 percent higher this year than last, but there's no way Americans can bring down the federal debt with their tax dollars. The spending is just too massive.

It would be surprising to find out that government tax receipts increased 21 percent. They didn't. O'Reilly is misreading the Wall Street Journal editorial where he got these number, which says that "federal receipts grew by 6.5 percent in fiscal 2011, including a 21.6 percent gain in individual income tax revenues."

Actually, the whole piece is unhelpful to his argument, since it argues that the rise in spending has actually been pretty modest over Obama's term;  it actually fell slightly from fiscal year 2009 to 2010. And the current deficit as a share of GDP--which is a better way to measure the deficit anyway--has dropped over the past two years.

And it's not clear why O'Reilly would choose the 2007 fiscal year to compare Bush's record to Obama's--unless the point is to make Obama look worse. The 2008 deficit was $459 billion.

O'Reilly says that he "is playing Paul Revere" here.  More like Chicken Little.

An article in the new issue of Newsweek (10/24/11)--"Obama's Big Green Mess: How the White House lost its Eco-Mojo"--presents White House policy as a series of failures.  It starts off with federal inspectors finding serious problems with various weatherization projects. That's just the tip of the iceberg--from Solyndra to stimulus, things aren't looking good. But writers Daniel Stone and Eleanor Clift seems to want to give White House critics an assist with things like this:

Overall, as the $787 billion economic stimulus--the primary engine for the green-energy agenda--came to an end September 30, it is clear that the program created far fewer jobs than promised. So-called green-collar jobs are notoriously hard to tally, but numerous estimates by gleeful Republicans put the taxpayer cost of each green-energy job created by the stimulus at more than $1 million.

OK, so it's really hard to figure out the numbers on this--but here's one that gleeful Republicans like to throw around?

In cases like this, it seems especially important to give readers a sense of the range of estimates. Robert Pollin from the University of Massachusetts estimates that you get 17 green jobs per $1 million of government expenditure. By comparison, the oil/gas industry produces five per million, the military about 11.

And at a House hearing on the White House and green jobs and stimulus funds last month, one Republican complained that the government was spending $80,000 per green job--that's 12.5 per million.

Newsweek is right to suggest that there are  debates over how to count green jobs, and how much the government should be investing in clean energy. But this article should have given readers more to work with than a scary-sounding number popular with Republicans.

Today the New York Times (1/18/11) reports a big scoop.

A "Tea Party commission" convened  by Freedom Works is set to announce its crowd-sourced $6 trillion debt reduction plan--"A copy of the preliminary findings was provided to the New York Times," Kate Zernike reports.

The story's second paragraph critiques the plan from the right for not doing enough about Social Security and Medicare, which Zernike asserts "are two of the biggest contributors to the nation's deficit." This is not true, especially when it comes to Social Security--but corporate media prefer to have discussions of the deficit that bash Social Security.

The larger problem is why this proposal is being covered at all. Even Zernike's account suggests that it doesn't really add up:

FreedomWorks says that repealing the healthcare legislation would cut $1.2 trillion, but the Congressional Budget Office has projected that repealing the legislation would actually increase the deficit by $210 billion over the next 10 years.

It's useful to recall how the People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was treated by outlets like the New York Times. This was a serious plan put forward by legislators and endorsed by several high-profile economists.  And it couldn't get into the news section of the New York Times. But this thing can.

Corporate media's incredibly uncritical boosterism of so-called "free trade" deals has been remarked on many times, and continues to be remarkable.

What else but blind faith would allow a story to carry a line like one in the October 12 New York Times, about textile industry opposition to the new deal with South Korea: "The production of shirts and sheets has shifted steadily from the United States to countries with lower-cost labor. Economists argue that this process strengthens the economy as companies and workers shift to more productive and lucrative kinds of work." Of course, if the Times has evidence of laid off textile workers' mass movement to more lucrative work, they're sitting on the scoop of the century.

Elite media's presentation of deals like those just passed with South Korea, Colombia and Panama consists of a barrage of unchecked claims: This time around, those featured funny numbers from proponents, who spoke of increased export growth without talking about imports--kind of like giving half a baseball score--and misleading context, like setting the deals within a storyline about jobs when there's no evidence such deals promote them.

Then you get a line, like that in the October 13 New York Times, once the deals have passed and been heralded as a "rare moment of bipartisan accord," that "the passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying relationships with strategic allies. The economic benefits are projected to be small."

Some would call that bait and switch. For the corporate press on trade deals, it's standard operating procedure.

I think people are genuinely surprised by the corporate media's shift on Occupy Wall Street: Things went from apathy, scorn and derision to front-page news rather quickly.

USA Today's editorial today (10/12/11) is headlined "Five Good Reasons Why Wall Street Breeds Protesters." It has the usual caveats--"The protesters' rhetoric against capitalism and 'corporate greed' is over the top, and they seem devoid of remedies," the paper notes--but on balance, the message is that there's plenty to protest.

What's galling is the sense that USA Today's been outraged all along. As when they explain:

Through lobbyists and campaign contributions, the banking industry has long had its way in Washington. This was evident in the Clinton-era legislation that repealed a post-Depression safeguard and allowed banking behemoths to combine banking and brokerages under one roof.

Boy, was it "evident," right? Remember all of those USA Today editorials denouncing the Glass-Steagall repeal? Neither do I.

In fact, this (4/9/98) is what the paper had to say about the removal of that "post-Depression safeguard":

It is nevertheless clear that banking laws designed for an economy 65 years ago don't work as well now. The goal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act was to keep banks separate from insurance and securities firms as a way to protect banks.

But the law has weakened banks. They've lost ground at home and abroad to more flexible foreign financial firms.

Responding to this concern, the Federal Reserve Board over the past decade used its authority as regulator of bank holding companies to chip away slowly at the Glass-Steagall wall, giving banks more leeway to set up securities subsidiaries. The Fed has gone about as far as it can under the law. Congress has to tear down the rest of the wall.

As lawmakers remove obstacles to the brave new world of finance, they must take care not to leave the consumer behind.

About  a year later, the paper (11/18/99) wrote that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was one of the few accomplishments of that congressional session:

On the eve of adjournment, after nearly 11 months in session, incumbents can point to only one major accomplishment: passage of compromise legislation overhauling Depression-era restrictions on banks, insurance companies and the securities industry.

If only we had listened then to what USA Today is saying now.

NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory, interviewing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Sunday (10/10/11):

GREGORY: What's going on in the streets of Occupy Wall Street?

EMANUEL: Yeah.

GREGORY: Complaining about the unfairness, railing against Wall Street. The president has sympathized with those protesters in the street.  Is demonizing Wall Street the way to create an environment...

EMANUEL: Well...

GREGORY: ...to get the banks to hire?

EMANUEL: The--it's not...

GREGORY: Is this not a reverse tea party tactic?

Leave it to the New York Times (10/7/11) to find a guy collecting unemployment who opposes the extension of unemployment benefits. He's "Dan Tolleson, a researcher and writer with a Ph.D. in politics...whose last good job was working for a group that aims to replace the income tax with a national sales tax."

But don't think reporter Shaila Dewan picked some unrepresentative oddball to highlight just to make a political point about "how divisive the question has become of providing a bigger safety net to the long-term jobless." Oh no--quite the contrary:

Even among those struggling to find work, Mr. Tolleson is not alone in his views. In a recent survey of the unemployed by Rutgers University, more than one in four respondents was opposed to renewing the current extended unemployment benefits. Three out of five said recipients should be required to take training courses.

But when you click on that link, you find that the Rutgers survey is not "of the unemployed"--the sample includes recently jobless people who are currently working, and of those respondents who are jobless right now, a large majority haven't gotten unemployment benefits in the past year. So how many people are like Donald Tolleson, collecting benefits that they don't the government should be giving them? Maybe none--the results aren't broken down that way.

Further, the survey asked about whether "longer and higher benefits from Unemployment Insurance" were a good idea in the context of "ideas that are being considered by government officials to help bring down high unemployment." So if you supported extending unemployment benefits because they would be good for the unemployed but didn't think they would help bring down unemployment, should you answer yes or no?

The question was asked in a more straightforward way by CNN the last time President Obama signed a bill extending benefits (12/17-19/10). Questioned whether they favored or opposed "an extension of unemployment benefits for workers who lose their jobs," 76 percent of a sample of adults nationwide were in favor, with only 22 percent opposed. Could it be that extending unemployment benefits is not as "divisive" as the New York Times would like you to think?

It sounded like it, but it was just Bill O'Reilly channeling Beck's Soros/MoveOn/Big Labor paranoia, minus the chalkboard:

On Wednesday in New York City, there was another far-left demonstration as a bunch of people marched on Wall Street. Why? We aren't exactly sure.

What we do know is that these folks are zealots who are being organized by some very interesting people. Does the name MoveOn.org mean anything to you? How about George Soros? Well, for the first time, MoveOn, funded in part by Soros, has openly allied itself with the protesters.

In addition, we have some unions in the mix: the United Auto Workers, the United Federation of Teachers and, of course, the always reliable SEIU. Of course, not all workers in those unions support bringing down capitalism. They don't. But their leadership is certainly sympathetic to the demonstrators.

But, again, what do these people want?

The common thread seems to be "income equality." Groups like the Working Families Party and the Strong Economy for All Coalition are basically socialistic outfits. They want the government to take money away from the affluent and give it to them, a nice deal if you can get it. And you can get it in places like Cuba and Zimbabwe.

The big money behind these protesters, Soros, he doesn't want socialism. Soros is the biggest capitalist on the planet. He wants power and these groups are using the far-left zealots to try to achieve that.

In case your tinfoil hat is not getting good reception, O'Reilly's point is that MoveOn endorsed Occupy Wall Street two weeks after it started, and George Soros contributed to MoveOn in 2003-04, and therefore Soros is "the big money behind these protesters."

Maybe the chalkboard would help.

Republican New Jersey Gov.  Chris Christie isn't running for president after all. This is bad news for the journalists who seemed so eager to promote his candidacy, but also for establishment pundits like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who thought a Christie/Obama contest would have been a victory for.... wait for it... centrism!

He writes today (10/5/11):

Had Christie--a moderate on gun control, climate change and immigration who has also backed Simpson/Bowles--run and won significant support, he would have forced Obama back to the center.

Then, instead of a race between the Democratic left and the Republican right--in which the whole country would lose because the winner would not have had a mandate for the real change we need--we would have had a race between the Democratic center, independents and the Republican center. Then the whole country would win.

Apparently Barack Obama has been veering too far to the left, mostly because he rejected some sort of  Simpson/Bowles "Grand Bargain" fiscal reform plan. Friedman quotes economist Tyler Cowen saying that the plan Obama has proposed "seems to be an extreme Democratic response" because it "is moving away from entitlement reform and embracing multiple tax increases on the wealthy."

Friedman agrees--Obama decided to "shift back to his base with a weak fiscal plan." What he should have  proposed was something that "shares the burden of cutbacks fairly--takes from defense programs and entitlements and asks the wealthy to pay more but everyone to pay something."

This criticism is bizarre.  Most people should know that the Affordable Care Act included significant Medicare savings--contrary to the media messages about the failure to rein in spending. (Those cost controls are in large part what gave us a Republican House of Representatives in 2010.) And as Friedman's paper reported, Obama's new fiscal plan includes another round of rather serious cuts to Medicare and Medicaid:

Obama Proposes $320 Billion in Medicare and Medicaid Cuts Over 10 Years

Perhaps Friedman wants deeper cuts, or cuts to Social Security. To him, that is "centrism." But most people in the country don't support these policies--making it strange to call them "centrist."

Friedman has been making a habit of late of wishing that Obama would propose some economic policies that he's already proposed--some mix of cuts and tax increases. This is exactly what Obama has been offering--and none of it resembles what the "Democratic left" is calling for.

The discussion on the economy in the media and among political elites is basically between the far-right Republicans and Obama--whose policy ideas might be considered center or center-right. Tom Friedman wants that debate to move even further to the right.

New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has been criticized for being too chummy with the Wall Street tycoons he's supposed to be covering. Today he has a piece in the Times (10/4/11) about Occupy Wall Street--which he's decided to check out because it's beginning to make some CEOs nervous:

I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?" the CEO asked me. I didn't have an answer. "We're trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this," he continued, clearly concerned. "Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?"

As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don't have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group--at least not yet.

Ah, the protesters aren't brutal--yet.

He goes on:

But the underlying message of Occupy Wall Street--which spread to Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles on Monday--is something the big banks and corporate America may finally have to grapple with before it actually does become dangerous.

What's the message?

At times it can be hard to discern, but, at least to me, the message was clear: The demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.

And that message is a warning shot about the kind of civil unrest that may emerge--as we've seen in some European countries--if our economy continues to struggle.

To give Sorkin credit, he does seem to have summarized the message of the protest movement accurately. The fact that he does so in the service of telling a CEO whether or not he should be worried about a popular uprising--well, that says a lot about the function of business journalism, doesn't it?