August 17, 2010
Yep, I paid for the paper this morning. Okay, most people would not call that “raiding.” But where on earth does the WSJ get off saying that the government has been “raiding” Social Security for decades? Was this article a paid political advertisement? (It reads that way.)
Of course, it makes as much sense to say that WSJ raided my bank account as to say the government raided Social Security. (Perhaps more, I thought I was buying a newspaper.) There was absolutely nothing improper done with Social Security money. It was used to buy government bonds. Readers of a business paper like the WSJ may have thought that its reporters understood how U.S. government bonds work.
The Social Security trust fund will redeem the bonds when they are needed to pay benefits, just as private citizens and corporations often buy bonds and then sell them off when they need the money for some other purpose. In the meantime, the government used the money it borrowed for other purposes. That is the way government bonds and other bonds work. It is also exactly how the law was been written, and it has been followed.
It also would have been helpful to point out that there is no obvious problem with the deficit and debt levels discussed in the article. The text seems to have been written by a hyperventilating reporter, when the numbers should raise about as much concern as a 4-2 baseball score.
The economy of course does face a crisis. The collapse of the housing bubble has left 15 million people unemployed and is costing us $1.5 trillion a year in lost output. Remarkably, these basic facts are largely absent from the article as the WSJ seeks to get readers and voters to focus on the deficit and its goal of cutting programs like Social Security and Medicare.
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