LOOK PAST THE...

LOOK PAST THE FACIAL HAIR. Greg Anrig has quite a crummy valentine for Robert Samuelson:

Samuelson compares the size of the "welfare state" in 1956 to 2006, counting Social Security and Medicare, and seethingly highlights its growth from 21 percent of the federal budget to 59 percent. He doesn�t mention that in 1956, the poverty rate among the elderly was over 35 percent compared to about 10 percent today. The two countervailing trends are intimately related. Say what you want about welfare, but social insurance works.

Samuelson is one of America's finest chin-strokers, forever sniffing over the irresponsibility of the federal budget and the growth of entitlement programs (which he wants to rename "welfare" programs) and the generosity of the state. He's particularly effective because his comments are always framed as Big Questions about Economics that only Robert Samuelson, speaking as a highly-paid and economically secure member of the intellectual elite, is courageous enough to tackle. If his one-sided and generally obtuse knocks at these programs were framed as ideological arguments as to the role of the federal government in providing social benefits, he'd have considerably less traction. If Newt Gingrich, for instance, said something like, "It might help if Americans called welfare programs -- current benefits for select populations, paid for by current taxes -- by their proper name, rather than by the soothing (and misleading) labels of "entitlements" and "social insurance," we'd all know what was going on. That it's credentialed Washington wise man Robert Samuelson doing the talking is supposed to make the same strategy somehow nonideological.

--Ezra Klein