November 22, 2010
A front page Washington Post editorial touted the “accord seen in debate over deficit.” It begins by telling readers that: “the sacrifices necessary to achieve those goals are coming into sharp focus.”
Included in the Post’s list of sacrifices are cuts to Social Security. It never mentions the fact that poll after poll continue to show that the vast majority of the public strongly opposes cuts to Social Security. It is only the select group of Washington insiders that the Post chose to cite that is agreeing on the “sacrifices necessary.”
It is also worth noting that the Post did not even mention plans by the Bowles-Simpson and the Pew-Peterson deficit commission to cut the annual cost of living adjustment. This change would reduce benefits by an average of 0.3 percentage point for each year that a worker receives benefits. This means that after 10 years their benefits will be 3 percent lower as a result of this cut. After 20 years the cut will be close to 6 percent. If the average beneficiary receives benefits for 20 years this means that the average benefit cut will be close to 3 percent.
For most retirees Social Security is most of their income. For the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, it is almost their entire income. This means that the change in the Social Security indexation formula proposed by these deficit cutters would have almost as much effect on after-tax income for many retirees as the proposed ending of the Bush tax cuts for high income households, which would increase their tax rate by 4.6 percentage points on income above $200,000. While the Post has devoted endless news stories to the consequence of this change in the tax code, it did not even think it was worth mentioning the proposed cut in Social Security benefits.
It is also worth mentioning that the Post’s consensus on reducing the deficit excludes the proposal from the IMF for more taxes on the financial sector. Insofar as taxes on the financial sector are not being considered it is likely attributable to the fact that financial interests are playing such a central role in the debate. A newspaper would call attention to this fact.
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