Hamsher serves up the baloney

I rarely check out the Lefty blogs since they're heavy on self-satisfying outrage and short on intellectual honesty. The "reality based community" rarely lives there. But since no issue animates me like Social Security reform, I followed the links on Memeorandum first to this David Broder article titled "Nation ripe for entitlement reform":

Last week, in a courageous break with party solidarity, the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, reiterated his support for the commission idea, suggesting that along with the overall health-care reform Obama has put on the agenda, Congress tackle Social Security.

As Hoyer pointed out, the options for dealing with Social Security "are well and widely understood. We can bring in more revenues. We can restrain the growth of benefits, particularly for higher-income workers, while we strengthen the safety net for lower-income workers. And/or we can raise the retirement age, recognizing that our life expectancy is significantly higher today."

"What is missing here," he said, "is not ideas. It is political will," and the degree of trust between the parties that would permit successful bargaining.

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake rolls out the familiar snark that "five guys in Congress" want to kick Grandma into the street:

The Social Security trust fund will take in a hundred billion more than it pays out this year, but since we'll blow it on increased defense spending, little old ladies must eat cat food to make David Broder happy.

That much is true: at least for a couple more years the Social Security Administration – which long ago recognized the need to build up a surplus to handle the Baby Boomers – is running a surplus. But this logic is the same as a guy jumping off a 50-story building and halfway down saying: "So far, so good!" We go "splat" around 2017:



At that tipping point, the Social Security Administration will start cashing in all the Treasury bills they've been squirreling away and the Federal government will have to pay them. This means only three options: higher taxes, less spending, or even more borrowing. And that last option is becoming increasingly more expensive as President Obama sets the nation up for decades of trillion dollar budget deficits. There is no amount of defense spending cuts that can fill the hole created by the unfunded liabilities of entitlements, much less the interest on the national debt in the U.S. budget.

Nevertheless, Hamsher insists that Americans don't want to see Social Security benefits cut. Surprising, I know! She backs this up with a poll:

But all that aside, where does Broder get the idea that the nation is "ripe" for this? A poll conducted last month by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare finds that 14% of Americans think it is in a state of crisis, and 5.5% are in favor of reducing benefits.

Really? The National Committee to Preserve Social Security said that? Firedoglake would have burned off a day's worth of posts if the NRA presented a poll on gun rights and tried to pass it off as disinterested research. Geez. It really makes no difference that people want to keep their benefits if the nation can't afford to pay for all the stuff it promised.

But a bunch of extremist GOP demagogues are in favor of it, and Steny Hoyer has opened the door, so that means America is "ripe."
I've sampled the people currently drinking beer in my kitchen, and America thinks David Broder needs to get out more.

Back to form: demonize and belittle all those who would disagree instead of debating the issue (as the comments below Hamsher's post will further attest.) In reality (there's that word again!) there's a growing coalition including former comptroller general David Walker and former CBO director Alice Rivlin who have launched a "fiscal wake-up tour" to alert Americans to the rising tide of debt on the horizon.

It's OK, Jane. Math is hard.