All posts tagged Cato Institute

Social Security And Journalism’s Failure To Inform

Journalists are supposed to inform us.

What one means by “inform” is, I suppose, in the news consumer’s mind, but the point is that anyone who regularly partakes of American journalism should at least understand the basics of any given issue in the news.

Alas, that is not the case. Journalism, and journalists, are letting us down.

As just one example, Trudy Lieberman of Columbia Journalism Review points out the gross deficiencies in media coverage of “the Social Security debate”:

For nearly three years CJR has observed that much of the press has reported only one side of this story using “facts” that are misleading or flat-out wrong while ignoring others. Whatever the reason—ideology, poor understanding of how the program works, gullibility, or plain old reportorial laziness—news outlets have given the public a skewed picture of the financial health of this hugely important program, which is the sole source of retirement funds for millions of Americans and will continue to be for decades to come.

Lieberman points out that Social Security, while “not in perfect financial health,” is nevertheless a tweak or two away from extended solvency, a fact which has not “been discussed much in the press.” The reason it hasn’t, Lieberman suggests, is “because it doesn’t fit into the doom-and-gloom narrative that has proved politically expedient to tell.”

The result of this misreporting or underreporting or non-reporting is that people—many of them young people—are losing their faith in Social Security, which plays right into the hands of right-wingers, who have always hated it:

“The elite press repeatedly quotes the commentary of the devoted opponents of social insurance retirement programs,” says Yale professor emeritus Theodore Marmor. “But they appear unaware of how they are supporting a strategic attack on social insurance that has been going on for years.”

Singled out for bad reporting and bad journalism is The Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery, the once-respectable paper’s budget correspondent. Montgomery pushes a narrative that fits nicely in with the narrative pushed by conservatives in the Republican Party: in order to come to grips with our financial problems, federal social programs—including Social Security—have to be sliced. There is a “surprisingly broad consensus” for that view, Montgomery’s reporting insists.

The Post’s Robert Samuelson is also specifically cited as pushing the “popular message” that Social Security is a welfare program that “is slowly and inexorably crowding out the rest of government.”  Other journalist at other outlets have done the same thing, which leads Lieberman to surmise:

With that kind of news reporting, young people…can be forgiven for misunderstanding the concept of social insurance and believing Social Security is almost dead. Over the decades since the passage of Social Security in 1935, the media have used the term “social insurance” less and less, which of course keeps people in the dark about what it really is. In 1930, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune together published nearly eighty articles with the words “social insurance” in the headline. In 1990, there were at most two—one in the Times and one in the Post. By then the Cato Institute and other conservative think tanks were well on their way to changing the media’s narrative and description of Social Security. The program was no long to be described as social insurance, but as an investment that fell short of what people could achieve on their own by saving and managing their payroll tax contributions. It was not a good deal for younger workers.

Lieberman tells us how the right-wing Heritage Foundation has “systematically” attacked “the country’s most popular social program” by deliberately using a “Leninist” strategy, including “guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it.” Part of that guerilla warfare involves gaining “the support of key individuals in the media as well as to win over vital constituencies for political reform.”

Sadly and disturbingly, not only have individuals in the media been won over, many Democrats have been compromised, too:

The media haven’t reported much about how the nuts and bolts of proposals to fix Social Security would affect ordinary people, but they’ve done a super job of showing how Social Security’s opponents have brought one of the biggest segments around to their way of thinking—Congressional Democrats, including the second ranking member of the Senate, Dick Durbin, who is often the media’s go-to guy for the progressive perspective. It’s kind of a validation of Cato’s manifesto…

“We used to have Democrats speaking out (in support of the program) which we don’t have today, “ says Eric Kingson, co-director of the advocacy group Social Security Works.

Well, I still hear some Democrats speaking out, but I admit their voices are not as loud and aren’t heard as often as they used to be. And part of the reason for that is because journalists have largely bought into the Social-Security-is-dying propaganda and are failing to inform the public as to what is really going on.

Thankfully, one outstanding journalist, Trudy Lieberman, is trying to do something about it.

by R. Duane Graham on April 19, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on April 19, 2012

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/social-security-and-journalisms-failure-to-inform/

GOP DNA

I don’t want to say a lot of Tea Party Republicans are delusional, but I have to.

I was sent an email this morning alerting me to a new article on Tea Party Nation. The article began with this:

I actually pity the Democratic Party these days even though I think it has brought the nation to ruin because, as Joseph Curl recently noted in a Washington Times commentary, “Democrats must spend, spend, spend, and spend. It’s in their DNA.”

Hmm. If spending is in Democratic DNA, somehow Democrats must have impregnated George W. Bush with it. And somehow they must have fornicated with the Republicans in Congress during Bush’s first six years in office and deposited a big wad of that spending DNA, which then produced big, fat deficit babies.

Because under W. Bush and his Republican Congress—who inherited budget surpluses—we saw nearly unprecedented spending. And you don’t have to take my word for it:

During his eight years in office, President Bush oversaw a large increase in government spending. In fact, President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ.  In his last term in office, President Bush increased discretionary outlays by an estimated 48.6 percent.

During his eight years in office, President Bush spent almost twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton.  Adjusted for inflation, in eight years, President Clinton increased the federal budget by 11 percent. In eight years, President Bush increased it by a whopping 104 percent. 

Now, that wasn’t written by me or Barney Frank, but by Veronique de Rugy.  Here is her bio:

…a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She was previously a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, and a research fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation…She writes a column for Reason magazine and is a regular contributor to The American, AEI’s  online magazine. She also blogs at The Corner at National Review Online and at Big Government.

You can see that she has some conservative chops. Here’s more:

Between FY2002 and FY2009, discretionary spending rose 96 percent…

Some argue that federal spending during the Bush years was so high because security needs drove up the budget… Whether this is true, the overall rapid rise of discretionary spending indicates that, here too, the administration and Congress made no trade-offs in the budget. If the administration and Congress wanted more security spending and wanted to be fiscally responsible, they should have found savings elsewhere in the budget.

“Wanted to be fiscally responsible“? Republicans?

Still more:

President Bush added thousands of new federal subsidy programs during his eight years in office. In 2008, there were 1,816 subsidy programs in the federal budget that spread hundreds of billions of dollars annually to special interest groups such as state governments, businesses, nonprofit groups, and individuals. The number of subsidy programs has grown by 30 percent since 2000 and by 54 percent since 1990.

Let’s turn to another source, this time McClatchy Newspapers:

George W. Bush, despite all his recent bravado about being an apostle of small government and budget-slashing, is the biggest spending president since Lyndon B. Johnson. In fact, he’s arguably an even bigger spender than LBJ.

“He’s a big government guy,” said Stephen Slivinski, the director of budget studies at Cato Institute, a libertarian research group.

The numbers are clear, credible and conclusive, added David Keating, the executive director of the Club for Growth, a budget-watchdog group.

“He’s a big spender,” Keating said. “No question about it.”

Most of you know that the Cato Institute and Club for Growth are hard-core right-wing institutions, but somehow the memory of big-spending Republicans has faded and a delusion fathered by hatred of Barack Obama has taken hold of many minds on the right.

Besides the defense buildup and Homeland Security spending under Bush and the Republicans, here’s more:

Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, points to education spending. Adjusted for inflation, it’s up 18 percent annually since 2001, thanks largely to Bush’s No Child Left Behind act.

The 2002 farm bill, he said, caused agriculture spending to double its 1990s levels.

Then there was the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit — the biggest single expansion in the program’s history — whose 10-year costs are estimated at more than $700 billion.

And the 2005 highway bill, which included thousands of “earmarks,” or special local projects stuck into the legislation by individual lawmakers without review, cost $295 billion.

“He has presided over massive increases in almost every category … a dramatic change of pace from most previous presidents,” said Slivinski.

And all that is without even considering the cost of the Bush tax cuts, which are still with us and—along with other Bush-initiated spending—still doing fiscal damage that Obama and the Democrats are getting blamed for.

Let’s go back to that delusional Tea Party Nation article and read that first paragraph again:

I actually pity the Democratic Party these days even though I think it has brought the nation to ruin because, as Joseph Curl recently noted in a Washington Times commentary, “Democrats must spend, spend, spend, and spend. It’s in their DNA.”

There. I feel better.

by R. Duane Graham on November 29, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on November 29, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/gop-dna/

“As Dumb As A Brontosaurus In A Blizzard”

Gene Lyons’ column in yesterday Globe was titled, “Bail me out of these GOP lies.” On Salon.com the column, in a slightly modified form, was titled, “How the GOP gets away with it.”

However one wants to label it, the column exposed a large part of the reason why the country is so divided, and why it is so hard to find compromise as we try to solve some of the country’s problems.

Lyons began his explanation as to why the country is becoming “as dumb as a brontosaurus in a blizzard” with this:

Has the Republican Party gone completely off into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, or have its leading spokesmen simply decided to mimic the party’s entertainment wing: trusting its loyal audience to believe even the most brazen falsehoods, and, equally important, to remember nothing?

[…] After all, you can trick a cow with an empty feed bucket once or twice. By the third try, it won’t even look at you.

GOP savants act as if Republican voters are more easily guided.

The specific issue Lyons was addressing was the Republican and conservative lies about the financial-reform bill being debated in the Senate, the one which Republicans claim would lead to “endless taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street banks,” a critique dreamed up by Republican spinmeister Frank Luntz, before there was a financial reform bill to criticize.

Never mind, as Lyons and nearly everyone else not employed by Rupert Murdoch has pointed out, the proposed legislation “would do exactly the opposite.”  Republicans seem to have the luxury these days of keeping large swaths of the population agitated by propagating fractional truths and outright falsehoods.

In any case, Lyons quotes Matt Yglesias, a blogger for Think Progress, as he nails the dynamics of the Republican strategy:

The only real test for whether or not lying works is whether or not you can bring your ideological fellow travelers along. Will Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck echo your line? Will the Weekly Standard and National Review? Will the bulk of your legislative caucus? The answers are yes, yes, and yes.

Lyons adds his own anecdotal evidence to the idea that “Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners” resist anything contradicting their world view,  a world view formed largely by disinformation campaigns like the one over financial reform:

Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

The column ends with a quote from Julian Sanchez, a libertarian from the Cato Institute:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted.

Those aren’t the words of a left-winger.  Again, Sanchez said:

Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted.

Now, admittedly, I am a former dittohead and I have a PhD in Limbaughnics.  But anyone who has listened for five minutes to Rush, Sean, Glenn, or has tried to talk to someone who regularly listens to them, knows exactly what Mr. Sanchez means.

And that, boys and girls, goes a long way in explaining the deep fissures among us, and why it so hard to get Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, to work together on the stuff that ails us.

As I wrote in February of 2009:

Limbaugh, right-wing radio, and the Hannitized local minions who contribute to the Globe, obviously don’t long for a government that nurtures unity…Their conservatism is divisive and destructive, a toxic concoction by which the most famous of these snake oil salesmen earn a substantial, if sullied, living.

And as long as they can make such a substantial living—as long as people tune in—expect more to come.

by R. Duane Graham on April 30, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on April 30, 2010

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/as-dumb-as-a-brontosaurus-in-a-blizzard/