60 Minutes declared war tonight on Social Security and Medicare. It told its audience (wrongly) that if these programs follow their current course, that we won�t be able to sustain our standard of living. If they wanted to be accurate, the 60 Minutes crew could have said that projected spending would slow the rate of growth of the standard of living (unless absurd assumptions are made about the government never doing anything for decades to reduce enormous deficits). More importantly, if they wanted to be accurate, the 60 Minutes crew could have pointed out that almost the whole horror story is driven by projections of exploding health care costs, not �entitlements� for the elderly (e.g. Social Security). As is clear to anyone who is moderately competent at arithmetic, the projected budget problems are due to a projected explosion in health care costs, not demographics. If U.S. health care costs were more in line with those in any other wealthy country, there wouldn't be much of a budget crisis to talk about. Needless to say, we had several opportunities to have warnings of "trillions" of dollars of debt. Sounds very scary, but do any of the viewers have any idea of what it means? Do the reporters doing the peice? Would it have been too hard to express the trillions as a share of future income, or would that have destroyed the fear factor? It would have been helpful if the 60 Minutes had been more honest with their viewers, but apparently they had another agenda to pursue.
-- Dean Baker
