Stopping Short
March 15th 11:45:53 AM
Citing a report issued by the Urban Institute, an article in USA Today takes a look at the unfairness of providing benefits to current senior citizens at the expense of future generations. It's worth the read (March 15, "In the News"), if at least for facts like the following:
1. "AARP, the nation's largest seniors organization with 36 million members, spent more on lobbying in three of the past four years than any group except the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Since 1998, AARP has spent $105 million on lobbying. The Children's Defense Fund, a major advocacy group, has spent $1.3 million."
2. "In the past four years, seniors have won key victories in Congress. In 2003, they got prescription-drug coverage under Medicare, projected to cost $38 billion this year and $119 billion a decade from now. In 2005, they helped block President Bush's plan to create private investment accounts in Social Security, which were favored in polls by young voters."
The problem with USA Today's news article is just that--it's a news article. There are enough pieces of information to put together a good argument for reform, but the newspaper stops short. This is a failure that may be explained by the article type and section, but I'm guessing USA Today won't be editorializing for personal accounts any time soon.
Which is a shame. Too much of the writing about entitlement programs falls into one of two camps: doomsday editorials that border on propaganda and urge immediate action, or vague news articles that suggest we may want to do something if we're to look out for the "kids," a word that properly refers to the offspring of goats.
What we need to see is how Social Security plays out on an individual level. We need to see a feature on a young worker who is barely making rent and can't afford a car and eats cheap fast food and, though he may not have shrapnel in his backside or chronic hemorrhoids, is most definitely being robbed of 12.4% of his income by Social Security's thievery administration. We need to see this story, because we all know that we would see the story about seniors in terrible arthritic pain because they can't afford prescription drugs. We would also see the story about poor families heating their homes with ovens in winter. And we know this because we have seen these stories. I'm not suggesting that financial hardship is less sad because of its prevalence. If anything, the opposite is true. But I am suggesting that these stories should not crowd out the media attention that our strain-us-until-they-break-us entitlement programs deserve.
Young voters supported personal accounts in 2005, and the level of support increased as we learned more about the opportunity for real ownership. But the decision didn't take place at a generational level, it took place at an individual level. Individual young people saw that their lives would be better with voluntary investment, and their decisions were made with the cool calculus of dollars and cents.
The way for this debate to advance is for papers like USA Today to use the information we all know and show how it plays out on the individual level. "The spiraling cost of benefits for seniors is limiting the federal government's ability to invest in kids," today's article declares.
Let's see how.
Posted by Ryan Lynch
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