Washington Post Goes Stark Raving Mad in Attacking Social Security

Tweet We all know that the Washington Post editors and most of it columnists want to cut Social Security, but serious papers try to keep a separation between these editorial views and the content of news stories: not the Washington Post.

According to an article in today's paper, the country faces a severe budget crisis: "At the heart of the debate is a reality inescapable for either side: Even without the war, spiraling health-care and Social Security costs have stressed the nation's finances to the breaking point."

A statement like this just leaves a reader wondering, what on earth are they talking about? The unifed budget deficit is projected to be 1.3 percent of GDP in 2007 and 0.7 percent in 2008. One can argue that this is too high, but "stressed the nation's finances to the breaking point"? Give me a break, the deficit was larger as a share of GDP in almost every year from the late sixties to the late nineties.

And what does Social Security have to do with this? Social Security has an annual surplus at present of almost $200 billion (approximately 1.4 percent of GDP). How is this surplus pushing the nation's finances to the breaking point? Would the budget look better if we didn't have the Social Security surplus, or does the Post think that we should be taxing workers $300 billion more than we pay out in Social Security benefits?

Clearly the Post doesn't like Social Security, but it should do a better job of keeping its editorial views from dominating its news reporting.

--Dean Baker in his blog
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=06&year=2007&base_name=_washington_post_goes_stark_ra#016779