Robert Samuelson desperately wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. To advance this agenda, he is pushing nonsense to young people, telling them that they should be furious about their parents and grandparents' Social Security and Medicare (seriously). While young people have ample grounds to be angry at people like Samuelson and his wealthy friends who have rigged the rules to shift the bulk of the country's wealth into their pockets (e.g. the $700 billion bank bailout), it is close to lunacy to be angry at their parents and grandparents for getting their modest Social Security benefits. Of course Medicare is getting expensive, but that is because papers like the Washington Post protect the interests of the insurance industry and the drug companies, thereby making health care far more expensive in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The reality is that most seniors will have almost nothing in retirement other than their Social Security and Medicare. This is largely because media outlets like the Washington Post touted the stock and housing bubbles and were largely closed to those issuing warnings of the disasters that these bubbles would cause. Most people therefore acted based on the views presented to them by the ill-informed "experts" whose voices were (and are) transmitted by these media outlets. The basic story is that Samuelson is anxious to beat up on the victims of this disaster, but is too cowardly to mention the powerful (including his employer) who were really responsible.
--Dean Baker
