Washington Post columnist Allan Sloan gets the BTP prize for being the first reporter/columnist to discover the effect that President Bush's health care proposal would have on Social Security. The basic story, as I explained last week, is that workers would have much of their income exempted from Social Security taxes if they bought a health insurance policy. This means that lower income workers, who have no income tax liability, would still have tax savings from buying a health insurance policy. But they would receive much lower benefits when they retire as a result. In the extreme case that I presented ( a worker earning $20,000 with a family policy), the Social Security benefit would fall by 60 percent. Give Sloan credit for picking up on this. (Trash him for whining about the Social Security surplus concealing the true size of the deficit -- reporters are supposed to know 3rd grade arithmetic, which means that they should be able to accurately report the size of the deficit, with or without the Social Security surplus.) Give the rest of the media a big "F." As I wrote before, I don't think that President Bush's health care plan is intended as a serious proposal, but insofar as it is taken seriously, the impact on SS benefits is a huge part of the story.
--Dean Baker
