Serious newspapers try to separate their editorial pages and their news reporting, but not the Washington Post. As regular Post readers know, the editors desperately want to cut and/or privatize Social Security. The program's overwhleming popularity, coupled with the fact that the Congresssional Budget Office's projections show Social Security to be fully solvent for the next 40 years, with no changes whatsoever, makes the Post's position difficult to sell. So, the Post never misses an opporttunity to try to impugn the financial health of the porgram. A short article on the front page of the business section refers to both "the rising costs of Social Security and government health-care programs" and "the escalating costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid" which are projected to double in the next fifty years. Of course, the problem here it is with Medicare and Medicaid, whose costs are driven by projections of rapidly rising private sector health care costs. But, the Post isn't interested in fixing the country's health care system, it wants to cut Social Security, so its reporters lump Social Security in with the other two programs and imply that the problem is demographics.
--Dean Baker
