Social Security

This is news to you, Karen? Krugman and Josh Marshall thoroughly dissected this two or three weeks ago.

No wonder no one reads Time magazine.

Karen, are you allowed to write about whether Social Security is, in fact, in crisis?

Is the idea that you think it would be inappropriate for you to consider the subject matter of the dispute between Obama and Clinton, versus simply repeating the he-said she-said?

You've reproduced some information (gathered by someone else) relating to Obama's proposal to lift the earnings cap on Social Security taxes and Clinton's characterization of that proposal, but this doesn't go to the basic question: what is the problem that Obama's proposal is intended to address, and is there in fact a "crisis"?

So, again, my question is: do you think it would be inappropriate for Time's National Political Correspondent to write about the actual substance of the disagreement between Obama abnd Clinton? Is the idea that you think it would be *unprofessional* to write about the actual issue?

You get a lot of (well-deserved) flack for covering the 2008 campaign in a superficial, substance-free, horse-race-obsessed manner. So, I'm genuinely curious as to whether you actually feel duty-bound to cover politics in this way, such that it would be unprofessional for you to take your eye of the horse-race ball and report on the substantive policy issues raised by the candidates.

I would be grateful if you could help me (and, I suspect, many others) understand why you're so committed to covering the election in this way.

Claiming that Social Security in crisis is a badge of courage in Beltway circles. I had this telling exchange with David Broder recnetly:

Rochester, N.Y.: You write "but Social Security is also out of long-term balance." Could you be more specific? Are you referring to the fact that under relatively pessimistic projections, it will go under in 2048? It would be helpful if you would cite specific data rather than just repeating the Beltway mantra "Hillary is not serious about the serious problem of Social Security."

David S. Broder: I wish I had my Social Security file close at hand today, but you will have to be content for the moment with generalizations. Unlike Alan Greenspan, I don't carry all the data in my head.

From Karen's article: Candor in politics can carry a big price.

But is it really candor? Take a look at Ezra Klein's comparison of Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. As Klein puts it, "Seeking to restore fiscal stability by strengthening Social Security is akin to trying to cure cancer by treating nausea."

If we're raising an alarm about fiscal stability, Social Security is a funny problem to raise the alarm over, because it's completely fixable. Medicare and Medicaid (really, healthcare generally) is the big problem. My guess is that conservatives really knew this during their recent efforts, but that Social Security privatization was the easier anti-New-Deal project. And to do that, they calculatedly raised an alarm. That Obama saw fit to pick up this hysteria and run with it, suggests that he's either not clued in to the debate, or he's deliberately picking up where a Republican anti-New-Deal campaign left off.

So anyway, if it is candor, it seems like an ill-informed candor. And if it's not candor, then it's not candor.

Actually there is a crisis in Social Security and it has failed. However, given the amount of revenue we pay into it we just haven't reached the crossover from positive to negative cash flow yet.

Social Security crisis

In 2017 we will crossover into negative cash flow where we are paying more than social security payments are gathering. Most of the liberal argument I hear is that we still have time to fix it and that could be so. However, what if we sign on for Hillary Care II. Her projections are 110 billion a year which is laugable. I have already shown given her campaign promises we stand to pay 675 Billion over her term just for her campaign promises so far. All of these will be ongoing additions to the tax base.

So this means that we can add in the year 2021 another 100 billion to the already 168 billion a year in additional tax burdens. The numbers don't look so bad till you realized they are based on a 110 billion a year for our healtcare. If you look at other projections that say it could be easily three times that. This would push us into paying a 5 year Iraq war that most liberals complain about every year forever.

Really does make you think. Why is everyone so quick to discredit this because it we have 10 years to fix it? We would have to make tremendous tax increases now just to keep it afloat later.

Eric--I suspect part of the answer to your questions lies in a thesis developed by the political communication scholar Lance Bennett and two of his former students in a great recent book, "When the Press Fails" (note: I have no personal connection to them).

Their basic argument is that DC journalists only know how to "index" their news coverage according to who holds the most political and institutional power at any given moment.

If anyone besides administration spokespeople and the handful of powerful congressman and echo-chamber blowhards tries to influence coverage--e.g., experts, citizen protestors, and whistleblowers--the DC press might give them a blip of attention. But since those actors don't have sustained control over institutional power, they in turn can't sustain journalists' attention.

Also, if journalists give these outside voices a lot of attention, then they start feeling uneasy about somehow "interfering" with the political process. Because, of course, that process should be controlled only by the usual powerful elites who dictate the rules of the he-said, she-said game.

I'm sure you're perfectly aware of these dynamics, but Bennett and his colleagues do a great job of documenting this idea that Amurrican journalism only knows how to follow power--not expertise, and not legal and moral rightness.

Actually there is a crisis in Social Security and it has failed.

Um, no. In fact, our social security system is the envy of much of the rest of the world. The British privatized their system under Thatcher and have had so many problems that they envy what we have.

Do some aspects of it need to be fixed? Probably at some point. But it's not in crisis. Again, Medicare and Medicaid is another story.

Karen's Update leaves me more perplexed about the reasoning behind the horse-race style of coverage than I was when I started. In January of 2005 -- almost three years ago -- Karen, wrote an article focusing directly on the idea that there was a Social Security "crisis." Though she didn't come right out and say it, her article made it clear that the answer to the question was: No, there is no crisis.

Fast forward three years. The issue arises in the context of the presidential primaries. Voters are actually making political choices now, based in part on their views on issues like Social Security and the positions politicians take on these issues. Karen's written about this stuff, so she actually knows first-hand about the substantive issue...

But her article skips over the substance completely, except when it's actually signalling that Obama ("there is a crisis") is the one being candid! Obama claims the program is in crisis, and "critics say" that it isn't. And the article insinuates that Obama is being candid about Social Security (meaning, presumably, that there is a crisis), while Clinton is hiding the truth (the truth that there is a crisis).

Re-read the article -- it doesn't refer to the January 2005 article. It doesn't say anything about who's right, one way or the other, except to the extent that a reader is left to infer from the attributions about "candor" that Obama (like Tsongas) has it right on Social Security while Hillary Clinton (like Bill Clinton) is playing politics with the issue rather than being candid.

(And I'm stumped as to what Karen means when she says that she noted in her article that the solvency outlook for Social Security hasn't changed since her 2005 article.)

I don't want to get carried away with the significance of this one article, but I do find it pretty telling as to just how disconnected political "journalism" has become from the goal of informing readers as to the significance of their political choices.

Enceladus -- thanks for the tip on the Bennett book. Sounds very interesting -- I'll check it out.

Karen, I followed the link over to your 3000-word(!) Social Security story. The date on your article is Sunday, January 16, 2005 which in the magazine business doesn't mean much.

Karen writes:

There's also an inconvenient fact that Bush rarely mentions: if workers start investing payroll taxes in individual accounts, the government will need another source to cover benefits for retirees--as much as $2 trillion by some estimates. The options are grim: borrowing heavily, cutting benefits or both. While Bush has not spelled out how he would deal with what are known in bureaucratic jargon as the "transition costs," Wehner and others at the White House have signaled that he is leaning toward a significant reduction in future benefits that gets deeper over the decades...

[Treasury Secretary]Snow heard caution but little naysaying when he made a pilgrimage to Wall Street last week. In a meeting on Tuesday with bond traders, he explained that the government might have to borrow $100 billion to $150 billion a year for 10 years to finance the new private accounts. Participants say the traders told Snow that the markets could easily absorb that much. As a bond executive said, "Mr. Secretary, that's a rounding error in our business."

Here's Paul Krugman from his January 11, 2005 column:

Advocates of privatization almost always pretend that all we have to do is borrow a bit of money up front, and then the system will become self-sustaining. The Wehner memo talks of borrowing $1 trillion to $2 trillion "to cover transition costs." Similar numbers have been widely reported in the news media.

But that's just the borrowing over the next decade. Privatization would cost an additional $3 trillion in its second decade, $5 trillion in the decade after that and another $5 trillion in the decade after that. By the time privatization started to save money, if it ever did, the federal government would have run up around $15 trillion in extra debt.

These numbers are based on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of Plan 2, which was devised by a special presidential commission in 2001 and is widely expected to be the basis for President Bush's plan.

Why do you think Krugman never corrected his figures after reading your 3000-word(!) story?

Eric: I don't want to belabor the point, and don't think this merits an update, but I want to point out that this was a story for our political briefing page--a one-page feature in the magazine, in which we try to give people a snapshot of what is going on. Given that much space, I didn't have room to revisit the whole 3,000-word piece, and tried to boil down the solvency issue here:

//But critics, including liberals who have allied with Obama on other issues, say any solvency crisis could be decades away. They accuse Obama of buying into the dire scenarios with which the Bush Administration tried--unsuccessfully--to partially privatize the system. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went so far as to write that Obama had been "played for a fool."//

Then, I was able to use more of the additional space to break down the two candidates' conflicting claims, which we did through Jackson's chart.

There is no crisis. Raise the age slightly, raise the cap each year 1/10 of 1% above inflation. "Crisis" over.

Maybe my idea of crisis is more serious than Obama's.

The solvency outlook for the system has not really changed much since then, as I note in this week's story.

You do? Where?

This is the closest you come...

But critics, including liberals who have allied with Obama on other issues, say any solvency crisis could be decades away.

...but it's simply a 'some liberals assert' statement that provides no independent assessment of veracity. Nor does it state that the "solvency outlook for the system has not really changed much" in several years. Nor does it in any way describe what the solvency outlook actually is.

Unless this issue of D-TT comes with a hyperlink to your prior 3,000 word article, pointing to that article as remedy for the deficiency of this one is unsatisfactory.

Finally, any chance you'll address whether the Social Security Trust Fund is backed by "full faith and credit" or is simply the Biggest Fraud Evah! perpetrated by Alan Greenspan and Ronald Reagan? If the trust fund is good there is no crisis. It would be helpful if journalists would persue actual journalism on this question.

I like the pictures: a sly, smirking Hillary; a smiling Obama. The article itself, which was a mushy piece of shit, also does a good job of some old attacks on the Clintons, without, of course, shedding any clarity on who is correct in the "debate" we have on hand. Oddly enough, the other story, linked to in the update, was pretty well written by Time standards. Bring in the Clintons and a presidential campaign, though, and the mental sewer opens up, out flows a miasma of shit, and what should be pretty clear turns brown.
Sometime in 2010 or so, Tumulty will probably write something about Social Security that actually has a point. Until then....

By the way, why should you be "pinned down" on something that isn't a pressing concern?

Karen, there is a major problem with that table you showed (and one of the reasons that Obama's numbers are not to be trusted.)

6.5% of individual taxpayers (which, of course, includes most retirees) not workers will earn $102K or more.

*********
The problem with what Obama is doing is simple... the Social Security "problem" has nothing to do with "solvency" issues, it has to do with overall budget issues. Raising the cap now will accomplish only one thing -- make it easier for politicians to not deal with the massive deficits created by Bush's fat cat tax cut.

I mean, right now, we pay 3.2% of GDP in interest on the national debt. If we don't let the Bush tax cuts expire, and we keep spending ridiculous amounts of money on pointless wars and unnessary weapons systems, we are looking at even larger deficits in the future -- and an even larger percentage of GDP devoted to interest payments (almost 17% by 2081 -- but the economy will have collapse well before then.)

Karen, While I don't agree that a "some critics say" line adequately introduces factual information into the discussion, I do take your point about this being a one-pager in the "political briefing" section and I appreciate your taking the time to respond to the questions and comments.

There are a few things that bother me about this issue. First is this notion that if you want to do anything for social security other than wait for fiscal responsibility that you are buying into the notion that there is a "crisis" (whatever the hell that means) and that you are miming the republicans who want to privatize. Why can't a democrat like Obama say that the system needs more tax money because of the boomers without people fearing that this is a slippery slope to privatization?

I realize that many bear the scars of fighting Bush on this issue, but if he couldn't get it done with a republican congress, I just don't see why so many of us dems have to be scared of our own shadow to even have an open-minded conversation about this. Oooh....the privatization boogey man is going to get us. Please.

Many dems are rather disingenuously accusing Obama of giving aid and comfort to the privatizers, so to speak...and I think this is just silly. Hillary is not only going around calling Obama's plan a tax increase on the middle class, which is really not true as Obama pointed out in the last debate, she has gone so far as to say it's a tax on seniors too. Well, I guess if seniors are making more than 97K it would be a tax on them...but are we really that worried about those folks not being able to get into the most exclusive golf communities?

One can argue about whether Obama gets brownie points for candor or not...but I think Hillary gets some major demogoguery demerits on this issue by spinning a this plan to put more money into social security as somehow harmful to seniors. She probably just figures if you repeat "social security" and "tax increase" and "middle class" and "senior" together in a sentence as many times as possible, the generally innumerate public will buy into her falsehoods. Kind of like what happens when you put "9/11" and "Saddam Hussein" together in sentences as much as possible. Obama totally got it right in the last debate when he called this logic worthy of Mitt or Rudy..though to be sure he was pulling his punches...Hillary was being very Bushian in how she was making her argument. I was half-expecting her to accuse Obama of "class warfare" before it was all done.

Why can't a democrat like Obama say that the system needs more tax money because of the boomers without people fearing that this is a slippery slope to privatization?

mostly because the system doesn't need more money right now, long term economic projections are notoriously unreliable, and the single most important factor in keeping Social Security viable is the health of the overall economy.

If we don't deal with the gargantuan Bush deficits ASAP, we'll never even meet the historically low rates of economic growth that the Social Security Trustees use. Right now, the US is paying 3.2% of GDP on interest on the debt -- and a nice big chunk of that money is being taken out of the US economy because countries like China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia hold so much of our debt. That debt service is a drain on the economy -- and its only gonna get worse unless steps are taken to start paying off the foreign held debt.

Then there is medicare --

the "hospitalization" part of medicare is the part that is funded by payroll taxes. There is also a medicare trust fund...that is currently running a small surplus, but will begin to be depleted soon, and will be exhausted by 2019.

Then there is the medicare "supplementals", the parts of medicare that pays for doctors office visits (Part B) and prescription drugs (Part D) -- all of which is funded out of general revenues, not payroll taxes.

And with projected rates of increased costs for health care--which are way above inflation or economic growth -- that system is "in crisis", and needs to be dealt with ASAP.

All that trying to "fix" social security now will do is hide the ever increasing general fund deficits longer....and create bigger problems in the future. We need to eliminate the Bush tax cuts -- and further increase taxes on the rich -- to restore fiscal sanity and preserve the US economy, and if we do that the "Social Security" problem literally disapears.

Commenters:

Karen successfully answers the question:

Karen, are you allowed to write about whether Social Security is, in fact, in crisis?

Here are Karen's own words, from the article to which she links (thank you so much KT):

Is There Really A Crisis?

President [Bush] has begun his assault--personally and through a cadre of emissaries from Vice President Dick Cheney to Treasury Secretary John Snow--labeling Social Security a "crisis" that must be fixed. "First step," Bush told TIME last month, "is to make sure everybody understands we have a problem." The President last week surrounded himself with citizens ranging from children to an 80-year-old and warned that the Social Security system will be "flat bust, bankrupt" by the time workers in their 20s retire. As early as 2018, Bush said, "you're either going to have to raise the taxes of people or reduce the benefits." At another appearance intended to promote federal standards for testing high school students, Bush went off script to warn a group of teenagers, "The system will be bankrupt by the year 2040."

That sounds pretty scary--except that it's not true. What will actually happen in 2018, according to the Social Security trustees who oversee the program, is that the money paid out in benefits will begin to exceed the amount collected in taxes. And since Social Security will run a surplus until then (and has been running one for some time), it has billions available that it can tap to fill the gap. Even under conservative estimates, the system as it stands will have enough money to pay all its promised benefits until 2042 and most of its obligations for decades after.

That projected shortfall is not a new situation, or even the worst that Social Security has faced. The system came within days of insolvency in the early 1980s. And there's always the option of fixing it the way policymakers did then, by raising taxes or tinkering with benefits by, for example, raising the retirement age. It's not a permanent solution, but it could add many decades to the life of the program.

So, we have it on record that Karen knows full well that there is no Social Security crisis.

...and the facts, as given to us by the 2007 Report of the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees, completely confirm Karen's reporting.

From the "Message to the Public" (Social Security section):

Although the program passes our short-range test of financial adequacy, it continues to fail our long-range test of close actuarial balance by a wide margin. Projected OASDI tax income will begin to fall short of outlays in 2017, and will be sufficient to finance only 75 percent of scheduled annual benefits in 2041, when the combined OASDI Trust Fund is projected to be exhausted.

Social Security could be brought into actuarial balance over the next 75 years in various ways, including an immediate increase of 16 percent in payroll tax revenues or an immediate reduction in benefits of 13 percent or some combination of the two. Ensuring that the system is solvent on a sustainable basis beyond the next 75 years would require larger changes. To the extent that changes are delayed or phased in gradually, larger adjustments in scheduled benefits and revenues would be required that would be spread over fewer generations.

So Karen is totally correct in her reporting (unlike her colleague Joe Klein regarding the FISA statute most recently passed by the House, for example).

What's odd about Karen's column is how, unlike in 2005, she does nothing whatsoever to inform her readers about what she knows. It's like she doesn't think that even a sentence (like "there is no crisis in Social Security") isn't warranted, because she wrote a 3000 word piece about it in 2005.

"...critics, including liberals who have allied with Obama on other issues, say any solvency crisis could be decades away. "

"Critics say"?
Sounds like the usual he-said she-said tabloid crap to me...

Karen? Will you not at least concede that it may reasonably appear to your readers that you're playing stenographer to the "controversy" without including the one single sentence that could de-controversialize the issue for them immediately?

Why can't a democrat like Obama say that the system needs more tax money because of the boomers without people fearing that this is a slippery slope to privatization?

P_luk has already done the heavy lifting, however I want to focus and reinforce this:

Social Security runs at a surplus right now, with the excess funding credited to the Social Security Trust Fund (SSTF), which is to be repaid when needed and is backed by law with the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. Government. Social Security does not "need more tax money" now.

If the SSTF is honored and paid according to the law, Social Security won't "need more tax money" until the 2040's under the pessimistic projections -- hardly something that needs to resolved now.

If the SSTF is not going to be honored then it would be folly to put "more tax money" into the SSTF now. Surely Obama isn't suggesting this?

In short, saying Social Security "needs more tax money" now is simply wrong.

Karen,

The problem here, I think, is that you missed the story. The three most pressing issues to Democratic voters right now are 1) Iraq 2) Health Care 3)Environment/Energy/Global Warming, with job security and future economic security looming inchoate in the background anxiety level.

Obama is under a lot of pressure, mostly from the media, to create a defining difference between himself and Clinton. (Never mind that other candidates have done so; the narrative says that only Clinton and Obama matter).

However he doesn't actually have any substantively different position from Clinton on these three issues. He and she both seek a middle course of compromise with existing "stakeholder" like the military/industrial-Serious Foreign policy analysts complex, the insurance company/drug company complex, and the energy industry.

Moreover this pressure is coming from the media. So his consultants picked SS as a safe place to draw a distinction. He chose a republican talking point--SS is in danger, and we have to face that danger now--that (as is the case with most republican talking points) is false.

Clinton responded with her own republican talking point, exaggerating the impact of the tax increase Obama is proposing, by combining multiple years into one big scary number, and implying that this would affect the majority of taxpayers, when it wouldn't (Note, again, this key feature of republican talking points.)

The story here is that Clinton and Obama have both chosen to have their key defining debate expressed in the terms of republican talking points.

For you, this is an indication that they both see the need to begin positioning now for the general election. This also, for you, should be an indication that both candidates have campaign staffs, and a personal predilection for "centrist" "safe" Beltway consultant strategies.

This means that the Democratic base in the primary is essentially being ignored. This is precisely the opposite of what is happening in the Republican primary, where Romney, Giuliani, McCain and Huckabee are all twisting around like pretzels trying to justify their claims on the base.

You already even have a tagline to kick this off--Howard Dean directed his primary campaign toward the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party"--Obama and Clinton, not so much.

This reinforces a general theme we're seeing in this cycle. Up until 2004, the Republicans were picking up independents, both in party affiliation and at the polls. That trend has dramatically reversed, moving the Republican candidates into positions that an objective journalist would describe as extreme, while the Democratic candidates are campaigning for those independent voters.

While this may be a good tactical move by Obama to identify himself as "facing the tough problems," it's a terrible strategic move for the Democratic party. It reintroduces a false issue that Bush had help them kill off by his own unwillingness to face up to the tough problem (as you outline in the archived article) of reducing the payroll tax without reducing benefits to current and near future retirees.

Moreover, Clinton's response makes things worse--reinforces Obama's raising the original false talking point of SS in trouble, but adding a new edition of Tax and Spend Democrat to the media mix.

Now, not from your perspective, but from your readers' perspective, it would be interesting to know what the other candidates have to say about this. Instead of a pseudo-factchecking breakdown, it would have been more helpful to just say, in a paragraph, that the system won't need a tax increase before 2040, so Obama is exaggerating the "crisis" while Clinton is overstating the impact of the payroll tax increase on all Americans.

And then quoted a couple of other candidates views on this. In particular, it's remarkable to me that given Edwards' chances in Iowa, that he isn't given more coverage. I actually don't know what he as to say about this. I think would be more helpful and relevant to your readers.

jayackroyd:

Excellent analysis!

I hadn't thought of extrapolating the Democrats' coopting of Republican talking points to position themselves in the general.

And by doing so, the Democratic frontrunners are running essentially against...Democrats?

Very interesting ideas.
Thank you!

I think that so much of this is dependent on what crystal ball you use and what assumptions you make about our fiscal situation going forward. I am skeptical that Hillary will find it as easy to return to "fiscal responsibility" as she claims. In the 90's, there was a huge peace dividend that occurred as a result of the ending of the Cold War. Given that Hillary has shown the propensity to echo the neocon line in matters of war, peace, and diplomacy in what I view as unnecessary compensation for her gender, I think that a Hillary adminsitration would probably continue more war spending than she would have us believe and that will affect the fiscal situation. We may get hit by another terrorist attack and have our economy hit, we may be in another war in the next ten years, we may have another Katrina like natural disaster, who knows....you can't predict the future will be smooth sailing with certainty. We are going to have to deal with an AMT fix that will probably cost a lot of money. Yes, we will let the bush tax curs expire, but with the prospect of universal health care and other spending priorities, I think the path to 90's style fiscal responsibility is highly uncertain at best. Given all these uncertanties and potential expenses that are going to come up right as the boomers start to reture, I don't think that it is a slam dunk to say that no more revenues should be put into the system now. It may be a prudent thing to do.

stuart--

Picking up independents is also important in the primaries. Independents won for McCain in NH. The reason there is a Dem primary in MI is to keep the Dems and Independents out of the republican primary. The republican leadership does not want Ron Paul to have a good showing.

So when Clinton and Obama make "centrist" appeals, they are also looking to independent voters in the primary--and, to my mind, more importantly, they are looking for media coverage. The media luuvves their Social Security crisis. What I think is interesting is that republican appeal to the media maelstrom is immigration--an appeal to the right of the republican center, disdaining independents and moderate republicans who are not expected to show up at the primary polls.

Now, not from your perspective, but from your readers' perspective... I think would be more helpful and relevant to your readers.

Posted by jayackroyd

This is kind of like lecturing an employee of, say, Philip Morris on their responsibility to smokers, or an employee of Anheuser Busch on their responsibility to drinkers, or (the second best analogy; the actual best involves prostitution), a drug dealer to his customers.

I'm still astonished, every day, by the fact that people think someone like Tumulty is motivated by some sense of social or professional responsibility. All anyone has to do is see these people furiously whoring for McCain, or their unconcealed hatred for Clinton to know that they have the same feeling of responsibility to their readers that a drug dealer has for his or her customers. Tumulty's responsibility is to her "swampkids and swamphusband," and then her social network; everything beyond that is an afterthought.

Ah, well, Martin Gale, if one takes that attitude, then one will never persuade anybody of anything. I prefer to believe that Karen does actually care about her readers. I know that people who write books mostly care about their readers, so I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that she may.

Moreover, at the very least she has to appear to care about her readers, or Time has to. So the least we can do is pretend to believe her, if we don't.

--Markoff Process

[buffing nails]

Digby agrees with me re: the strategic disaster introducing this issue represents.

[/buffing nails]

Ah, well, Martin Gale, if one takes that attitude, then one will never persuade anybody of anything. I prefer to believe that Karen does actually care about her readers. I know that people who write books mostly care about their readers, so I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that she may. Posted by jayackroyd

If you start out from an incorrect premise, it's likely you're going to reach an incorrect conclusion. If your goal is to make Tumulty a better journalist, I don't see how appealing to her on the grounds of the interests of her readers is the way to do it, when she has demonstrated, over and over again, that she doesn't care about her readers. Think about the number of times, for example, she has linked to some absolutely hideous article that she calls "terrific," because she's pimping one of her fellow Time hacks. Someone who put their readers first would hardly do that -- but then, someone who put their readers first wouldn't write articles like the one Tumulty did, above, when it's perfectly clear she knows better, based on the other article she wrote. I see no evidence Tumulty cares a whit for her readers. Her loyalty is to herself, which means it's to Time, which cuts her her paycheck. And Time has its own agenda, which I won't pretend to know in its entirety, but which I do know is no different from the agendas of Philip Morris, Anheuser Busch, et al. I think it's reasonable to assume that Time's attitude about its customers is no different than those companies have towards their own. Sure, they're grateful for the business, but.... At least Philip Morris puts a warning label on its products.

It seems to me that if your goal is to get her off her spreading ass and make her do her job better, it would be logical to start from an honest evaluation of what she's about, rather than pretending she's a better person than she is and hoping she grows into your projected image. A) She's probably too old and set in her worldview to grow very much; and B) it's a variation of what the Democrats have been doing for years, and it hasn't exactly worked very well. Philip Morris puts those warning labels on because the public got in its face and forced it to, not because people successfully appealed to the company's sense of the public good, its deeply held concern about the well being of its customers. I think it's naive to expect someone like Tumulty, who is entirely a creature of Time and a rotted Beltway culture, to behave any differently.

Social security is a fundamental American right and I expect the government to ensure that it will be able to support me when I choose to retire. We need to increase the monies we put into it and not allow privatization as that would destroy the safety net that we as Americans are entitled to.

The rich (those making over 100,000) have a civic duty to make sure that everyone is cared for. That is the mark of a GReat society.

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