US economy: tax cuts, social security and other media lies
Gerard Jackson
President Bush just cannot stop lying about the US economy. At least that’s the message that Michael Gawenda, Washington correspondent for The Age, has pumped out. According to this Bush-hating paragon of journalistic virtue President Bush has conjured up a phony social security crisis in order to intimidate Democrats into supporting private accounts.
But it was Clinton, one of Gawenda’s heroes, and not Bush who first argued that social security was facing an impending crisis. When in 1998 he was asked what he would do with the surplus, Clinton answered: “I have a simple four-word answer: Save Social Security first”. This is the very same Clinton who said that the US economy is “threatened by the looming fiscal crisis in Social Security”.
The arguments that Gawenda is attacking as Bush hysteria were also made by Clinton. Let me quote: “We have a great opportunity now to take action now to avert a crisis in the social security system” (italics added).
In 1998 he declared: “By 2030, there will be twice as many elderly as there are today, with only two people working for every person drawing social security. After 2032, contributions from payroll taxes will only cover 75 cents on the dollar of current benefits. So we must act, and act now, to save Social Security”.
Clinton was not alone in his warning, Gore, Kennedy, Boxer and Gephardt joined the chorus, singing out that social security had to be saved if the “looming fiscal crisis” was to be avoided.
Yet Gawenda deliberately writes as if the social security issue was manufactured by Bush to trap the Democrats. Mr Gawenda is not an honest man. In fact, I have no hesitation in calling him an outrageously bigoted liar.
Describing the President’s efforts to defend his proposed social security changes as nothing but “circuses”, Gawenda falsely claimed that “polls show an increasing majority of Americans do not want social security changed and that they do not trust Mr Bush to protect their retirement benefits”.
Being a typical leftwing journalist, Gawenda chose not to name any of these polls. After all, the last thing Mr Integrity would want is for someone to check them out. Well I have, Mr Gawenda, and they reveal you to be a calculating liar.
A Zogby poll released in January found that 30 percent of Democrats said they liked the idea. A later Zogby poll showed that 51 per cent of black voters support private accounts and were willing to invest as much as 50 per cent their payroll tax in individual accounts. It was also found that though 55 per cent of retiree aged 65 and older opposed private accounts, this figure fell to 45 per cent when told their own benefits would remain unchanged.
An Annenberg poll released figures last December showing that 54 percent of Hispanics supported the idea of letting workers invest their social security funds in the stock market.
The McLaughlin group poll found that 55 per cent of voters support private accounts with only 27 per cent opposed. When asked what they would do if private accounts were given a federal guarantee that investors would receive at least as much as they would get from social security, support jumped to 64 per cent
In March Ayres, McHenry & Associates made public a poll which that when assured that their benefits would not be touched and that private accounts would remain voluntary for younger workers, 59 per cent of those older than 55 supported the proposal.
Rasmussen survey asked those polled if they preferred private accounts or no change. The answer was 45 per cent in favour of accounts and 37 per cent against.
The Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America’s Social Security (Compass) recently released a poll showing 60 per cent of unionists support private accounts. The poll was conducted by Ayres, McHenry & Associates.
A Washington Post poll released in March showed that 56 per cent of Americans support the idea of private accounts. Yet the same rag had the audacity to lead with: Support for Bush on Social Security Wanes: Barely One-Third of Americans Approve of President's Plan, Poll Finds
So how could Gawenda honestly claim that all the polls were against Bush? As if I we didn’t know.
Gawenda didn’t stop at lying about polls. He tendentiously claimed that the Bush “tax cuts … have benefited the rich but led to a budget deficit of historic proportions”. How in heavens name could the tax cuts have caused the deficit when about 90 per cent of them didn’t start coming into force until 2004? Is this joker going to argue that the $158 billion deficit for 2002 was caused by last year’s tax cuts?
Even the New York Times reported: “Falling incomes, rather than tax cuts, appear to count for the greatest share of the decline in income taxes paid. That is because the higher one stood on the income ladder the greater the impact was likely to be from the stock market crunch” (29 July 2004).
And what about those Bush tax cuts that are causing Mr Gawenda so much anguish? The Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center reported that the cuts actually increased the tax burden on the richest 5 per cent! For example, households whose adjusted gross incomes were $75,000 or more paid on average nearly twice as much as those earning less than $75,000, i.e., 24 per cent against 12.6 per cent.
Anyway, what makes Gawenda think that the tax cuts did not stimulate the economy? In other words, without the cuts things would have been worse. Furthermore, as he ought to know, the deficit is shrinking. This is exactly what an informed person, which Gawenda is not, would expect in the circumstances.
Thinking he was being clever, Gawenda asserted that the President’s social security proposals were “an echo of the Bush campaign in 2002 to convince Americans that Iraq was a major threat to the US and that the only thing to do was remove the Saddam Hussein regime by force”.
The insinuation is clear: BUSH LIED!
As is always the case with liars like Gawenda it is what they leave out that counts. Therefore did Kerry lie when in 1997 he stated on CNN’s Crossfire that “We know that Iraq is a danger to the United States and we reserve the right to take pre-emptive action whenever we feel it's in our national interest”?
Was Teddy Kennedy in cahoots with President Bush when he said on September 27, 2002: “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction”?
Was Senator Edwards also lying when he said in September 2001 that Saddam Hussein was “the most serious and imminent threat to our country”?
No wonder reading our newspapers has become a stomach-turning experience.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 28 March 2005