Sunday, November 28, 2004

And the Greenspan Committee's Requires...?

The newspaper of record weighs in on Social Security with this headline:

Bush's Social Security Plan Is Said to Require Vast
Borrowing
Of course, the punchline to a very old joke, is again appropriate: "Compared to what?".

The Times reporter tells about half the story with statements such as:

The White House and Republicans in Congress are all but certain to embrace large-scale government borrowing to help finance President Bush's plan to create personal investment accounts in Social Security, according to administration officials, members of Congress and independent analysts.

The White House says it has made no decisions about how to pay for establishing the accounts....

A reasonable amount of borrowing now, the proponents say, would avert a much bigger financial obligation decades later.

And positively dances around the truth with such as:

In an effort to pressure the White House to acknowledge some of the financial trade-offs in its approach, Democratic leaders in Congress this week asked Mr. Bush to include in his next budget an accounting of the money that would be needed for his Social Security plan.

Only by including such figures in the budget, the Democrats said in a letter to Mr. Bush, "will Congress and the American people be able to weigh the difficult trade-offs between large-scale borrowing, Social Security benefit cuts, tax increases, and other spending reductions that may be required to fund your Social Security private accounts proposal. "

Therefore, the Fly Under the Bridge Academy offers-- to fill...part of the void, keeping their audience current on topics of specific interest-- this translation:

In a political calculation designed to brand the Bush Administration as mean to the elderly and kind to Wall Street, the Democrats in Congress put on a song and dance show to make Republicans the bearers of the bad news that has been coming due since 1983 when The Greenspan Committee on Social Security failed to put in place a plan that would have corrected the demographic imbalance that everyone knew was going to have to be dealt with.

In other words, to meet the promises made to the baby boom generation to return their increased payroll taxes to them, taxes have to be raised or those benefits have to be cut. Regardless of whether we set up a system of private accounts to fund future generations retirement.

The FLUBA wonders, do reporters at the NY Times charge by the word for the stories they write?

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