S.S. S.O.S. B.S.

[rodeodance]

S.S. S.O.S. B.S.


Feb. 3, 2005, at 12:42 AM PT

http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2113093&

The New York Times' Page One Social Security piece takes some serious swings, past the jump: "The president did not address the cost to the government of paying full benefits to retirees for decades while tax money was being diverted into private accounts. Nor did he say how much this would increase the annual budget deficit. There was no mention of what would happen to workers who become disabled, or the minor children of workers who die. No one in the administration mentioned how workers who retired when the market was in a slump would be protected financially." And that's just a partial excerpt.

The Wall Street Journal does a "lessons learned" from the roughly 20 countries that have partially privatized their state pension systems. One: Don't give workers too many choices; they'll screw it up. Another: Going private can add lot of debt, helping to explode the economy. (See Argentina and Bolivia.)............



......Back to SOTU... A number of the papers solidly compare-and-contrast the president's talking points with reality, especially on Social Security. The LAT's piece is particularly good. But the most unvarnished fact-checking by the papers, not surprisingly, isn't actually in any of them. Post associate editor Robert Kaiser was asked in a Web chat, "Anything said strike you as objectively untrue?" He responded, in part:

Yes. Bush often describes a world whose features are all highly debatable, if not simply invented. He proposes "a comprehensive health care agenda" that will leave perhaps 50 million Americans without health insurance. Is that comprehensive in any meaningful sense? He promises big economic benefits from legal changes, "tort reform," that independent economists say cannot have more than a small economic effect even if enacted, which is not likely. he promises to increase the size of Pell Grants, not noting that they have shrunk far below the level he promised when he came into the White House.