Chad Schuldt, former paid Daschle campaign staffer, has been continously lying about the so-called guaranteed benefits of Social Security on his web site and in the Argus Leader. Then he falsely accused John Thune of stealing those benefits. Now today he is supporting the lies with lies from Paul Krugman. Here is a Don Luskin post titled "Lies upon lies upon lies" regarding the Krugman NYT propaganda piece that Schuldt uses to support his position:
Paul Krugman's New York Times column today terribly distorts the already terribly distorted meaning of a quotation from Jason Furman, liberal economist at the liberal think tank The Center on Budget Policies and Priorities. Krugman tries to give the impression that "progressive price indexing" of Social Security benefits -- which President Bush proposed in his press conference last week -- would severely reduce benefits for the middle class. He quotes Furman thus:
"For millions of workers," Mr. Furman writes, "the amount of the monthly Social Security check would be at or near zero."
What Furman actually wrote, however, was quite different. Furman's statement depended on not just considering progressive price indexing of benefits, but also the fact that workers would (1) voluntarily reduce their standard benefits in exchange for likely greater benefits from personal accounts; and (2) pay their Medicare premiums by deduction from their Social Security checks. Here is what Furman wrote:
For many middle-income workers, Medicare premiums would consume most or all of the very small monthly Social Security benefit that would remain under the combination of progressive price indexing and "carve-out" private accounts. Social Security checks for millions of ordinary American workers thus would be close to or at zero.
Krugman took Furman's quote wildly out of context to make it seem as though progressive indexing alone would reduce the Social Security check. But Furman's original quote is deceptive in its own way. First, it may nominally reduce the amount of a check to have a payment for Medicare (or anything else) deducted from it, but that doesn't reduce its value. And second, Furman is falsely setting the post-retirement benefits resulting from personal account values at zero; in fact, those would be paid out each month too, no doubt as part of the Social Security check.
The Times yesterday took another subtle opportunity to misquote CBPP -- its most reliable and frequently cited source of left-leaning economic analysis. In a front-pager yesterday -- "Social Security: Help for the Poor or Help for All?" -- a graphic showing the purported reduction for various categories of wage earners caused by progressive indexing cites both the Social Security Administration and CBPP as its source. In reality the SSA has never published one iota of the information contained in this graphic; its entire content comes from CBPP, which itself claims that it developed its analysis based on SSA figures. But isn't it so very much more credible for the "paper of record" to pretend it is using government statistics, rather than mere analysis from a left-leaning lie factory?
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