Today the New York Times reports on the debate over spending, deficits and the State of the Union (1/24/11):

The public itself seems split, or perhaps confused. Americans overwhelmingly say that in general, they prefer cutting government spending to paying higher taxes, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll published last week. Yet their preference for spending cuts, even in programs that benefit them, dissolves when they are presented with specific options related to Medicare and Social Security, the programs that directly touch millions of lives and are the biggest drivers of the long-term deficit.

Social Security is not a big 'driver of the long-term deficit,' especially when compared with Medicare, which is a far more serious concern.

More to the point: In the poll cited (which was reported by the Times last week), the public was asked about cuts to Social Security, Medicare or the military. Opposition to cutting spending did not "dissolve"; the public picked cuts to the military by, as the Times put it, "a large margin."

If the public is indeed "confused" by anything, it could be the fact that, in the debate over cutting government spending, their preferred option-- cutting the miltary budget-- finds little support in official Washington, and is mostly ignored by a media more focused on the apparent necessity of cutting Social Security.

At the end of 2009, the Washington Post published an article that was produced by the Fiscal Times. As FAIR noted in an Action Alert (1/6/10):

The article, headlined "Support Grows for Tackling Nation's Debt" (12/31/09), was a product of the Fiscal Times, described in an accompanying note as "an independent digital news publication reporting on fiscal, budgetary, healthcare and international economics issues." More accurately, it's a propaganda outlet created and funded by Peter G. Peterson, a Wall Street billionaire and Nixon administration cabinet member who has long used his wealth to promote cuts in Social Security and other entitlement programs.

That Post's Fiscal Times piece was the subject of intense criticism, which the Post's ombud eventually addressed. As FAIR summed it up (1/13/10), ombud Andrew Alexander criticized the paper for a "glaring lack of transparency with its readers" by not disclosing the Fiscal Times' connection to Peterson and his interest in the issues it covers. Alexander added that the piece "was not sufficiently balanced," and that publishing a story so closely aligned with the agenda of the funder of the project  "was inviting suspicion about its motives."

Yesterday  the Post was at it again (6/20/10), publishing another Fiscal Times piece extolling work that Peterson is closely aligned with. Under the headline "Labor Leader, Chief Executive Team Up to Reduce the U.S. Deficit," Post readers are treated to a soft profile of two members (an "unlikely duo") of the White House's deficit reduction commission. Did the piece entertain serious criticism of the ideas being advanced so far by the commission (cutting Social Security, most notably)? Hardly--here's about as close as they got:

A debate is raging in Congress and among economists about whether this is the right time to start reducing deficits. Many liberal groups worried about high unemployment argue that the economy is still so weak that the government should keep spending and deficits high to prevent a double-dip recession. But lawmakers in both parties are balking at new stimulus spending, and some economists argue that the deficit needs to be reined in sooner rather than later.

What about disclosure, then? The Post offered a note at the top of the piece, mentioning that the reporters "work for the Fiscal Times, an independent news organization that specializes in fiscal and economic matters. It is funded by Peter G. Peterson, who separately supports groups that advocate for long-term debt reduction."

Ah, I get it.  Peterson has spent many millions of dollars warning about Social Security's threat to the nation's finances. But the news outlet he organized and bankrolls to make these arguments in journalistic form is separate from his long-standing political interest in these topics. Huh.

In a June 8 piece about a liberal summit in D.C. this week, the New York Times notes that the left's support for programs like Medicare and Social Security are out of touch with fiscal reality, and that budget cuts elsewhere aren't going to matter much:

In truth, none of the cuts in annual appropriations will significantly reduce the long-term deficit projections. Those are driven mostly by escalating costs for the benefit programs that liberals most aggressively protect--Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security--and by insufficient tax revenues to support them.

As has been noted many times, Social Security has amassed a surplus of over $2 trillion; that plus the expected revenue from Social Security taxes will keep the program solid for the next 25 years. Medicare is in much worse shape; why the two should be talked about together as if they are comparable drains on the federal government is unclear, unless one wants to associate Social Security with Medicare's more severe problems.

For an illustration of the difference, see this graph from the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities:

The Washington Post's Lori Montgomery, meanwhile, goes after Social Security's "defenders" today (6/9/10), who have given a "sinister cast" to the White House's deficit commission, accusing it of having "a secret plan to gut Social Security." Social Security advocates are using "heated rhetoric" and are "threatening to rally the public against" benefit cuts, which is seen as an "ominous sign"  for the commission.

Of that group, Montgomery writes, "Adjusting Social Security benefits is a likely point of consensus, commission members say."  By "adjusting," she presumably means "cutting" in some form. So it's "ominous" that Social Security's "defenders" are pointing out this reality about the deficit commission.

Like the Times piece cited above, the Post portrays the issue as simple mathematics: "Budget experts say it would be difficult to significantly reduce future deficits without addressing the rising cost of Social Security."

The Post lays out the argument in favor of Social Security's viability:

The program's defenders argue that there is no crisis: If Treasury would repay billions of dollars in surplus Social Security taxes borrowed over the years, the program could pay full benefits through 2037. But many budget experts question whether supporting the existing benefit structure should be a cash-strapped nation's first priority.

So "experts" are on the side of the Post, while "defenders" are out to protect the status quo. As if to reiterate that point, the next graph quotes an analyst at the Heritage Foundation about the "intellectual consensus" on his side.  As Dean Baker notes at Beat the Press, this is in effect saying that the government should default on the portion of its debt held by the Social Security trust fund. That would be a rather radical idea--misappropriating trillions of dollars collected from working people that were to supposed to go to support the retired elderly, and instead using them to keep down tax rates for the wealthy--but one can count on outlets like the Post to portray it as a necessary solution offered up by the "experts."

Fox News host Glenn Beck (4/13/10) came out against Social Security yesterday:

Have you ever wondered why we even have Social Security? It's not an American idea. It's first from Germany in the late 1800s. Hmmm, lets see, who else was prominent in Germany at that time...Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche. This is where the first progressive ideas came from, and when those ideas floated across the Atlantic, they took America off course.... The progressive wave of European social insurance infected America and this is the result of it. This is European thinking, not American.

Now, factchecking Glenn Beck is a bit like telling Jackson Pollack to color within the lines, but it's worth pointing out, as Matthew Yglesias (4/8/10) noted, that Nietzsche was not only not a progressive, he actually comes across as someone who today might be a Glenn Beck fan:

Socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be; its endeavors are thus in the profoundest sense reactionary. For it desires an abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had; indeed it outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as it expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury of nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the community.

But more interesting than Beck's forays into 19th century German philosophy are his attempts to whip up some resentment among his audience toward high-living grandmothers:

When FDR signed that Social Security bill, it wasn't designed to subsidize a cushy retirement, so seniors could jet set all across the globe on vacations. Social Security was meant as insurance....  In1930 life expectancy was only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65! You weren't even expected to ever get the benefits. Today life expectancy is 75 years for men, 80 years for women, and too many people rely and count on Social Security funding their weekly shuffleboard tournaments. You should have saved!

The odd thing about this is that Beck's audience, as with cable news in general, is pretty old--in a typical recent week, roughly 72 percent of his audience was 54 or older (assuming he doesn't have a lot of under-18 fans).  You have to wonder--how do they feel being painted as a bunch of freeloaders, currently or in the near future?

Beck may be falling into the trap of assuming that his followers have the same ideology that he does. He may oppose government social programs in general because he thinks such programs aren't "American"--but there's a large number of white Americans who oppose welfare programs because they are perceived as mainly benefiting black people, at the same time that they support social insurance programs like Social Security because they are seen as helping white people. One suspects that such people make up a significant percentage of Beck's biggest fans.

The Washington Post (4/8/10) continues its crusade against Social Security (Action Alert, 1/6/10; FAIR Blog, 5/15/09, 5/13/09,  4/1/09) in a front-page news story by Neil Irwin and Lori Montgomery:

Social Security is already draining resources from the broader federal budget, as spending on benefits has risen above this year's Social Security tax collections. While that gap is expected to be fleeting, the program, the largest single item in the federal budget, is projected to require sustained support within the next 10 years.

If you are a retiree under the age of roughly 90, then you paid extra Social Security taxes--cumulatively amounting to trillions of dollars-- precisely so that the Treasury would be giving money back to the system during your retirement, thus keeping the system in the black. The Treasury is "supporting" Social Security in precisely the same way that your friend is "supporting" you when he pays back that money he borrowed from you.

Claiming that "something needs to be done--and fast" to save Social Security, Parade magazine's Gary Weiss (11/22/09) suggests a downside to the idea of raising the ceiling on taxed income, so that income above the current $106,800 would be subject to the Social Security tax: "Raising the cap is popular among Social Security reformers but would increase the tax burden on the middle class, since more of their income would be subject to the tax. " (By contrast, "Raising the payroll tax rate would disproportionately affect lower-income workers.")

According to the Census Bureau, less than 5 percent of individuals over the age of 15 in the U.S. have incomes exceeding $100,000 a year.  That's a peculiar definition of "the middle class."

If Weiss truly believes that "experts agree that the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to solve the system’s financial ills," he ought to read Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot's Social Security: The Phony Crisis.

Yesterday the Social Security and Medicare trustees' reports were released. This annual ritual often gives reporters a chance to exaggerate the long-term problems of the Social Security system.  This year, the news was more or less what folks were expecting: By the trustees' forecasting, Social Security's trust fund will be depleted in 2037, while Medicare's hospital fund will run out of money in 2017.

Somehow, the Washington Post decided that Social Security was the real concern--its page-one story is headlined "Alarm Sounded on Social Security."

The lead rings the same bells:

The financial health of the Social Security system has eroded more sharply in the past year than at any time since the mid-1990s, according to a government forecast that ratchets up pressure on the Obama administration and Congress to stabilize the retirement system that keeps many older Americans out of poverty.

Much less attention is given to Medicare, which the Post does tell us deep in the piece "remains the more urgent problem." The paper sure has a funny way of showing its urgent concern, though.

As FAIR noted, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan tried to provide some perspective about Social Security and Medicare two years ago. When NBC's Tim Russert asked him about the health of Social Security and Medicare, Greenspan said that Social Security's problems were minor. Economist and former Social Security trustee Robert Reich writes, "Don't be confused by these alarms from the Social Security and Medicare trustees. Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one."

The Washington Post, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, are sending a very different message.  As Dean Baker has documented for some time, the paper just seems to have something against the program.

Long a critic of the Washington Post's habit of pushing of "its editorial position in the news section" when operating as "a strong proponent of reducing Social Security benefits," Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 3/31/09) has a new example of what he dubs the Post's "Jihad Against Social Security":

In keeping with this practice, it headlined an article today, "Recession Puts a Major Strain on Social Security Trust Fund." The article refers to the fact that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now projects that annual tax revenue will be nearly in balance with benefit payments for the next several years. Previous projections had shown large surpluses.

While those seeking to cut Social Security benefits are highlighting these new projections, in reality they have very little significance for the program. Under the law, Social Security benefits are paid out of its trust fund. This trust fund has accumulated a surplus of almost $2.5 trillion. The lower projected surpluses for the next few years will have some impact (if the projections prove correct) on the date at which the fund is projected to be depleted, but the projected depletion date will almost certainly be beyond 2040, even after CBO adjusts its numbers for the downturn.

Spying what "presumably... would be an important factor in any debate over reducing benefits," Baker notes that, "remarkably, this piece alludes to plans to cut benefits without ever noting that older workers and retirees have just lost close to $15 trillion in wealth due to the collapse of the housing bubble and the plunge in the stock market."

Media Matters (2/24/09) catches AP reporter Liz Sidoti garbling Barack Obama's position on entitlements:

He called the long-term solvency of Social Security "the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far" and said reforming healthcare, including burgeoning entitlement programs, was a huge priority.

What Obama actually said was:

In the coming years, we'll be forced to make more tough choices and do much more to address our long-term challenges, from the rising cost of healthcare that Peter [Orszag, Office of Management and Budget director] described, which is the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far, to the long-term solvency of Social Security.

In other words, healthcare is by far the single most pressing fiscal challenge--not Social Security.

What's surprising is not that a reporter would misunderstand a speech--Obama's phrasing could be a little bit confusing, I guess--but that anyone who follows politics for a living wouldn't know that healthcare is a bigger problem than Social Security. Maybe they should pay less attention to corporate media.

Jackie Calmes reports in the New York Times (2/23/09):

The president signaled in his campaign that he would support addressing the retirement system’s looming financing shortfall, in part by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $250,000. But that would ignite intense opposition from Republicans, especially with the economy deep in recession.

Liberal Democrats are already serving notice that they will be equally vehement in opposing any reductions in scheduled benefits for future retirees. But any solution, budget analysts said, must include a mix of both approaches, though current beneficiaries would see no change.

Really?  Budget analysts said it was impossible to balance Social Security's books without tax increases and benefit cuts?  That's odd, considering that Social Security's 75-year shortfall amounts to about 1/300th of projected GDP.  Were these the same budget analysts who described a system that is projected to need help paying its obligations starting in 2041 as having a "looming financing shortfall"?

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (2/8/09) quotes from yet another "Time magazine article about Larry Summers and how incredibly brilliant he is":

Perhaps as early as March, they'll launch their biggest lift with the beginnings of a plan to reform Social Security and Medicare, the two entitlement programs that, even before the economy collapsed, were threatening the Treasury with bankruptcy.... When Obama unveils his annual budget in late February or March, Summers promises that the president "is going to describe the kinds of approaches he wants to take to the entitlement problems that have been ignored for a long time." Some options might include delaying retirement, stretching benefits and lifting the cap on taxable earnings....

On that front, Republicans could come to Obama's rescue. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has told Obama in person that his party favors entitlement reform and would work for passage if both parties shared the risk.

That's right, one of the geniuses largely responsible for the formation of our current economic crisis is being lauded by Time--and so many other corporate outlets--for alarmist Social Security misinformation thoroughly debunked for years now. Or, as Schwarz notes in his usual pithy way: "It really required a Democratic president full of hope and change to cut Social Security."

Yesterday the New York Times reported on the status of a new PBS news program Worldfocus. Amidst budget cuts at the New York station where it originates, the program has received some unusual financial support--a $1 million grant from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. What does the funder expect to get out of it? The Times reported that

the foundation expected Worldfocus to produce reports examining how other countries have dealt with the challenges facing the United States, like healthcare and Social Security reform.

The head of the foundation, David Walker, added that the show will maintain "total control over the content."
That's pretty standard language; what the Times should have explained is that the Peterson Foundation has for years specialized in scare-mongering over the future of Social Security and warning against the perils of deficit spending.

Thus, the public broadcaster is taking funds to cover a set of issues from an institution that spends its money advocating a specific political agenda on those issues. Is this OK at PBS? The answer would seem to be yes; over the years FAIR has documented the network's conflict-of-interest double standard.