Top newspapers play into Social Security scaremongering

 Top newspapers play into Social Security scaremongering
By Monique Morrissey
http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/top_newspapers_play_into_social_security_scaremongering/
Top Newspapers Play Into Social Security Scaremongering  

An article in the New York Times last week announced, “Obama Promises Bid to
Overhaul Retiree Spending.” The
Washington Post responded this week with “Obama Pledges Entitlement Reform,”
also splashed across the front
page.This is reading a lot into Obama’s vague answers to reporters’ questions
about entitlement programs,
first at a press conference to introduce his new Chief Performance Officer,
Nancy Killefer, and later in a
conversation with the Post editorial board.

At the press conference, Obama didn’t mention these programs in his prepared
remarks about making government
more efficient. Even when a Wall Street Journal reporter asked a loaded question
about Medicare and Social
Security (“Budget experts, as you know, agree that the real key to controlling
federal spending lies with the
entitlement programs…”) Obama offered boilerplate language about the federal
deficit writ large, calling these
programs “a central part” of these discussions as an afterthought (listen to the
full transcript here). Buried
in the Post article, which should really have been titled “Obama Pays Courtesy
Visit to Post Poobahs,” the
Post acknowledged that “Obama was careful not to outline specific fixes for
Social Security and Medicare,
refusing to endorse either a new blue-ribbon commission or the concept of
submitting an overhaul plan to
Congress that would be subject only to an up-or-down vote…”

The Wall Street Journal to the contrary, Obama and his team of experts,
including his choice for budget
director, Peter Orszag, know that the biggest contributor to long-term deficits
is rising health care costs
(see, for example, Orszag’s speech at Stanford University). As Obama put it to
the Post, “We can’t solve
Medicare in isolation from the broader problems of the health-care system.”This
is a challenge Obama has
already said he will take on. As he and his aides recognize, the problem is not
retirees – it is
out-of-control health care costs.

As for Social Security, the Congressional Budget Office under the direction of
Peter Orszag, Obama’s choice
for budget director, estimated that Social Security expenditures would rise with
the boomer retirement, but
that most of this increase would be covered by the trust fund – which was built
up for this purpose. As a
result, CBO projected the program’s long-term deficit to be a very manageable
0.38% of GDP. As the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, this is much less than the cost of
extending the Bush tax cuts
to the top 1% of taxpayers. Tax cuts for the rich, not retirees, are the real
threat to our nation’s fiscal
health.With older Americans facing plummeting 401(k) balances, Social Security
benefit cuts in the form of
scheduled increases in the normal retirement age, and rising out-of-pocket
medical costs, the focus should be
on whether we’re devoting sufficient resources to retirees, not whether we
should be slashing their benefits