September 10, 2012
Today Fred Hiatt celebrates Rhode Island’s Treasurer Gina Raimondo, who cut public employee pensions while partially replacing them with 401(k) accounts that should mean millions of dollars in additional revenue for the financial industry. This is the sort of upward redistribution that the Post loves.
In the course of praising Raimondo, the Post throws in a few lines about the need to cut Social Security, trying to scare readers with talk of the program’s $7 trillion deficit over its 75-year planning horizon. Are you scared, are you really scared?
Serious newspapers would put this measure in a context that readers could understand. They presumably know that none of their readers have any clue what $7 trillion means over the next 75 years means. On the other hand, the Post could have said the projected shortfall was equal to 0.5 percent of GDP, but hey, that probably doesn’t sound scary enough.
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