Originally posted at palaverer.com.
Wondering if our idiot government had come to some debt ceiling conclusion, I popped onto CNN's website. I intended a quick glance before doing a little research for something I plan on writing on debt ceiling foolishness and its relationship to radical change. I regret to report this article, prominently displayed:
Are baby boomers to blame for debt crisis?
...Still, as a generation, they will have paid less into the Social Security system than they are expected to take out. According to a report from the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees, the Social Security system is expected to be solvent until about 2037 -- largely because of the surplus in the Trust Fund -- even though the payroll taxes flowing in stop being enough to cover the expenses flowing out in 2017.
It's this type of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that will send me into exile before my days are done. I'll note in passing that the supposed crisis of Social Security is nothing of the sort.
The main purpose of the gross exaggeration of the Social Security crisis of the twenty-first century is to demoralize the active workers who pay the current taxes which provide the current benefits for the retired workers, who are their parents and grandparents. The crisis-mongers want to drive a wedge between the generations; they want to weaken the political opposition of the younger workers to the current attack on the benefits of their parents and grandparents. But beyond that the enemies of Social Security want to soften up the many millions of younger workers for a dismantling of the whole system and for its partial replacement by individual insurance and private company pensions.
That article, from the
Monthly Review, was written in 1983. The right has been trying to Chicken Little the working sensible, for decades.
The article at hand, however, is nastier than the usual nonsense about Social Security fear mongering. I expect my national press corps to lie to me, I'll note. I get the news by analyzing the particular way my press lies to me at any given time. If they lie in way x, then development y is likely taking place. One never knows precisely where one stands with this kind of approach, but it's what we're working with. It's not like Russians didn't know what was actually happening under the Soviet system. They understood their government much better, as it turns out, than people in the United States understood theirs. Digression aside, this is nastier lying than usual: I don't recall a more intellectually dishonest attempt to insinuate the supposed insolvency of Social Security into a news cycle.
Social Security is funded by its own revenue stream. While Congress will dip into Social Security funds from time to time, in a commonplace though somewhat ethically shaky form of accounting, it's not the real issue in our current manufactured crisis. At issue is spending in the regular Federal Budget, and how much one ought or ought not to tax for it.
So, our corporate media does a standard trick. It puts a question in place of a headline. Be clear: in proper journalism, headlines are declarative statements. The obvious answer to the question here is negative, and since a responsible press reports actually existing things, we know we are dealing with something other than a responsible press. Lakoff's book is entirely on point here. Any of our brains are susceptible to suggestion, and the worst thing we could do is think that the current mess in Washington is actually about Social Security, because then some of us might be more amenable to no-good changes in it.
Remember why the right wants to dismantle Social Security as we know it:
- If we take that revenue stream direct it into 401k accounts, account managers make 1% or so off that revenue as commission.
- More importantly, if working people--from day laborers to doctors--put the whole of their retirement into the stock market, then the whole of our futures depend on the financial well-being of the extremely rich.
ADDENDUM 7:58 pm PST:
If anyone thinks I'm cranky, check out this one, and who CNN chose as the Democratic "elder":
Arlen Specter is a former Democratic senator from Pennsylvania and chairman of the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence.
Read it and weep.