The usual suspects in the think-tank industry keep flooding the media zone with scary figures—and even scarier pictures—to frighten the public into submission.
And, needless to say, they don’t mention the people who are impoverished or food-insecure in the wealthiest nation on Earth, a population that includes seniors and people with disabilities.
“There are three kinds of lies,” Mark Twain once said, “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Today, there’s a fourth kind: pie charts. A glance at this chart could almost convince a person that we can’t afford Social Security and Medicare. But, even by the benchmarks of orthodox economics—the lingua franca of the policy class—it is deeply misleading.
They’re leaving out something else: Social Security is fully funded by its own dedicated revenue levied specifically for that purpose. If Social Security didn’t exist, that revenue would not be collected. The inverse is also true: if that revenue wasn’t collected, Social Security would not exist. Importantly, by law, those dedicated revenues can only be spent on Social Security benefits and their related administrative costs. This is not a complicated concept.
At the same time, they put out charts and figures which ignore the requirement that benefits are paid only if there is sufficient revenue to cover their full cost. They perform that little act of misdirection so they can claim that Social Security contributes to federal government’s debt. Then they use that misinformation to call for—you guessed it—benefit cuts.of its costs are paid from general revenues.
The Center for a Responsible Federal Budget is not the only group working to eviscerate seniors’ benefits, of course, and pie charts are not the only visual format used to terrify policymakers and the public into submission. Another popular tactic is the long-long-long-term projection, where current trends are extrapolated to the stars and beyond.
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