Robert Samuelson uses his secure position within the Coward's Corner (a.k.a. the Washington Post opinion pages, dubbed the "coward's corner" for the Post's refusal to print dissenting opinions on this issue) to take a sideways swipe at Social Security. Samuelson makes the valid point that transfer payments have grown rapidly as a share of the federal government budget over the last four decades. The dishonest part of the story is in the graph accompanying the article. The graph shows that "Social Security and other payments to individuals" rose from 21 percent of the budget in 1956 to 59 percent of the budget in 2006. The deceptive part of the story is that the "other payments" accounted for the vast majority of this increase. While Social Security went from 7.8 percent of spending in 1956 to 20.6 percent in 2006, "other payments" went from 12.8 percent of spending to 38.4 percent of spending over the same period. The bulk of these other payments are the main government health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid. So, once again we get a health care cost problem being portrayed as a Social Security problem. Welcome to the Coward's Corner.
--Dean Baker
