Washington Post Discards All Journalistic Standards In Attack on Social Security

[Derechos]

News outlets generally like to claim a separation between their editorial pages and their news pages. The Washington Post has long ignored this distinction in pursuing its agenda for cutting Social Security, however it took a big step further in tearing down this barrier with a lead front page story that would have been excluded from most opinion pages because of all the inaccuracies it contained.

The basic premise of the story, as expressed in the headline ("the debt fallout: how Social Security went 'cash negative' earlier than expected") and the first paragraph ("Last year, as a debate over the runaway national debt gathered steam in Washington, Social Security passed a treacherous milestone. It went 'cash negative.'") is that Social Security faces some sort of crisis because it is paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes.

This "treacherous milestone" is entirely the Post's invention, it has absolutely nothing to do with the law that governs Social Security benefit payments. Under the law, as long as their is money in the trust fund, then Social Security is able to pay full benefits. There is literally no other possible interpretation of the law.

As the article notes the trust fund currently holds $2.6 trillion in government bonds, so it is nowhere close to being unable to pay benefits. The whole point of building up the trust fund was to help cover costs at a future date when taxes would not be sufficient to cover full benefits. Rather than posing any sort of crisis, this is exactly what had been planned when Congress last made major changes to the program in 1983 based on the recommendations of the Greenspan commission.

The article makes great efforts to confuse readers about the status of the trust fund.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/washington-post-discards-all-journalistic-standards-in-attack-on-social-security?

[Frustratedlady]

1. Get those jobs going and they won't have to worry about SS.

Their scare tactics are working, as many of my friends (intelligent and generally level-headed) are terrified the govt. will take away a good portion of the SS. That's all they hear.

I swear the RW is trying to kill off the elderly by spreading these false rumors. Many of these people are widowed and don't like to discuss money matters with others outside the family, so they sit at home and fret until they make themselves sick.

Criminal, at best.

[Fumesucker]

2. Deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit..

Cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts.

I wonder where anyone could get the idea that the government has a cash flow problem and might be cutting SS?

ETA: It was OWS that managed to move the conversation in DC slightly away from non stop 24/7 deficit/cuts talk to jobs and some other topics.. It certainly wasn't the Democrats that did it.

[SharonAnn]

3. Well, my 401-K went cash negative this year. I retired and started drawing from it

instead of putting into it.

But, since I had saved money into it for my retirement, it's fulfilling its purpose.

We saved the money into into Social Security, the first generation to put extra in for ourselves and not depend on future generations to pay everything for us. Now that we're retiring, we're able to take some of the mney out of the fund to pay our retirement.

If we hadn't saved extra, we would now have to raise taxes or cut benefits IMMEDIATELY". That would really be bad.