Rescuing Social Security again...and again...and again. Same song, many verses.

[madfloridian]

It's amazing how much alike the verses have become. We only have to look back a few years to see that what we are hearing today about Social Security's risky future sounds just about the same.

We should have caught on by now.

From 1997 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR):

Can Social Security Survive Another "Rescue"?

The rescue of Social Security has been a staple of American journalism for 20 years now—a story all the more remarkable in that Social Security has never been in peril except from its rescuers.

The rescues have all been based on faulty arithmetic. First, in 1977, the rescuers humbly confessed that they had made a mistake in adjusting benefits to inflation, as a result of which Social Security was threatening to go broke. (They never say the Army is threatening to "go broke," only that it needs more money to do the job that it's asked to do.) Not to worry. Amid the Yuletide hosannas of our massed punditry, our leaders found the courage to enact a correction that would, they swore, assure solvency into the 21st Century.

Later they turned Alan Greenspan loose on it, and that part reminded me of the recent Fiscal Commission, fondly called the Catfood Commission.

A bipartisan commission under Alan Greenspan went to work on the numbers, while the media developed an unprecedented campaign of vilification of the elderly. On magazine covers, in cartoons and columns and on broadcast commentaries innumerable, they were depicted as hogs, vampires, sharks, gorillas and card sharps scooping up the sustenance of the young. While the investment banker Peter G. Peterson led the media legions, Greenspan fabricated a hurricane warning. Multiplying one false assumption by another (for example, he assumed that the C.P.I. would rise nearly three times as fast as it actually did rise, while his private firm was forecasting an even smaller increase), he predicted that Social Security would go bankrupt in 1983.

The scare headlines permitted Congress in early 1983 to enact a bill acclaimed in headlines as a great rescue. In addition to the previously scheduled cut of 20 percent in benefits for new retirees, it clipped six months of cost-of-living adjustment from all then and future beneficiaries, raised payroll taxes further and postponed the retirement age from 65 to 67 in phases to begin in 2002.

The solvency of Social Security was thus assured for 75 more years.

The same author, John Hess, had written another article for FAIR in 1991, called Geezer Bashing, about media attacks on the elderly.

Geezer-Bashing

In their drive to punish gray hair, big media give no quarter. There is no trial, no defense.

"Elderly, Affluent -- and Selfish", snarls a typical op-ed in the New York Times (10/10/89). "The 800-Pound Gorilla Vs. the Hungry Baby", growls a Washington Post column (10/22/90), referring to the invisible geezer lobby as an ape. Time magazine (11/26/90) says the country could work its way out of the hole it's in "by spending less on the elderly and more on preschoolers," but alas, "the elderly vote and preschoolers don't." Columnist Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News (10/22/90) proposes a cure for that: a Constitutional amendment denying the vote to everybody who gets a government check, like Social Security.

Over the last decade, while taxes on the rich were being cut by more than half, old age benefits have taken repeated hits. Early '80s bankruptcy scares allowed for sharp cuts in pensions and heavy increases in payroll taxes, touted to assure the solvency of Social Security into the 21st century.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the perpetrators of these cuts, has since acknowledged that the insolvency of Social Security was a hoax, but it enabled the media to present the cuts and hikes as a "Social Security rescue." (See Extra! , 1-2/88.)

Daniel Moynihan admitted that the insolvency was a hoax, but they still keep on using the same tired terms over and over.

So the powers that be are trying to rescue Social Security again. It is showing the priorities of our nation, I fear, when they keep revisiting this issue....again, and again, and again.

Crossposted at DU3

[No Elephants]

1. This is pure Democratic Leadership Council doctrine, as you pointed out in another post.