December 14, 2010
The Washington Post has long expressed its disdain for the Social Security program in both its opinion and news section. It continued this practice by not even mentioning the potential impact of the tax compromise on Social Security in an article reporting on the progress of the bill in the Senate.
The risk is that the Republicans will put pressure on President Obama to extend the payroll tax cut beyond this year by describing the end of the tax cut as a tax increase. This raises the prospect of a permanent reduction of 2 percentage points in the payroll tax. The loss of this revenue would effectively double the projected shortfall in Social Security over its 75-year planning horizon putting its future in serious jeopardy.
While this article reported the results of a poll on the package it ignored the most obvious implication. The extension of unemployment insurance benefits is hugely popular even among Republicans. This suggests that the benefit of extension would likely pass as a stand alone effort. That means that politicians who are raise concerns about the unemployed as a reason for supporting this package are not being honest.
It also would have been helpful if the numbers in this piece were expressed as a share of the budget and/or the economy. That way most readers may have been able to assign them some meaning. As it is, the Post could have just substituted the words “really big number,” RBN to save space, and provided as much information to the overwhelming majority of its readers.
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