Tara Bernard of NYT shows Social Security crisis, but then denies it

The New York Times says Social Security will be paying out more to retirees than it collects in taxes from workers this year. Then Times reporter Tara Siegel Bernard says, “So while Social Security’s finances are stable in the short term, most experts agree that the program needs to be bolstered for the long term.”

This is the state of post-modern journalism. Hope is reported as fact. The math is dismissed. There is nothing stable about Social Security's finances in the short term.

It’s this year that Social Security’s cash flow goes into the red. Social Security taxes no longer can make up for the fact that there is nothing in the “Social Security Trust Fund,” Tara. For that last 40 years, everything that was supposed to be deposited in that “trust fund” has been spent on everything but Social Security. (Even in the federal “surplus” year 2000, the Social Security money didn’t go into the Social Security fund. It was diverted to pay a little of the national debt.)

Through 2037. The IOUs of more than $2 trillion in the “trust fund” are what allowed the Social Security trustees to report dishonestly -- and Tara to report foolishly -- that “Social Security will … be able to pay full benefits through 2037.”

The awful journalism also allows politicians like Sen. Harry Reid to tell us, as late as last month, that Social Security is in fine shape. The untruthful reassurances are exactly the kind that allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take on $1 trillion in recklessly bad home loans for 15 years and destroy the economy in 2008.

Tara, here’s the test for how much real money is in the “Social Security Trust Fund”: Ask those trustees what they will have to do to cash in those $2 trillion in IOUs, and then ask them what they would do if the trust fund were empty and they wanted $2 trillion. It will turn out they would have to do the same thing (tax or borrow $2 trillion) – proving those IOUs are worth exactly zero.

Unstable now. With the Social Security tax stream no longer covering current Social Security costs (And this is only a few years earlier than expected, despite Democrats’ many earlier protests that Social Security is not in crisis), Social Security’s finances are in no way stable for the short term.

Tara, many of the people in your story seem to understand Social Security’s imminent inability to pay its bills. But on the basic facts, you got it wrong.

It’s because newspapers as prestigious as The New York Times got this story so wrong for so long that this nation was unable to reform Social Security into a self-sustaining system before it was too late. It's too late, and the Times is still getting it wrong.

Frank Warner

Comments

[Neo]

The math is dismissed.

Like so many election stories that never mention the tally. Words like "large margin," "landslide" are not a vote tally.