Social Security: The Individual and Society

Texas Governor Rick Perry continues to stand behind his comment that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.”  He could be more wrong, and his statement reveals much about how he sees the role of government and, indeed, the fundamental nature of a democratic society. 

First, let’s get something straight.  A Ponzi scheme is defined by Wikipedia as “a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors.”   Social Security is not an individual investment.  It is, as its name suggests, a way that the people of the United States, through our constitutional democracy, have agreed, over several generations now, to set aside funds to ensure that everyone who needs it has access to a modicum of income during their retirement years.   The problem with Social Security is not that it was set up to be deceptive; it is that (1) because of the phenomenon of aging Baby Boomers, the ratio of young to old people has changed since Social Security was designed in the 1930s and (2) people are living much longer than they did in the 1930s.  These two factors put a stress on the ability to maintain the Social Security funds:  Relatively fewer people are supporting a relatively larger group of senior citizens who are living longer. 

There is no question that Social Security needs to be adjusted so that it can continue to work in the years ahead.  However, that is no excuse for a Presidential candidate to call it a criminal act.  Either Rick Perry is incredibly uneducated or he is incredibly immoral—willing to knowingly tell lies in order to attract money and support from an ideological fringe group.  Or, perhaps, he simply is unable to see how the interests of individuals relate to the interests of the broader community in which they live.  No wonder, in that case, that, as Governor, he spoke favorably about Texas seceding from the United States. 

One is tempted to laugh at this kind of foolishness.  But that would be a mistake.

In Praise of Fact Checkers

Twenty-four hour news channels have changed much of how we perceive the news of the day.  One not-so-good impact has been a significant reduction in serious, in-depth analysis on a daily basis.  Instead, news events tend to be presented by bringing together disparate voices on a topic and letting them go at it.  The live format provides little opportunity for the news anchor to challenge opinion and get at the real facts of the matter.   It makes one pine for the 22 minutes or so of nightly that we used to get from CBS, NBC, and ABC in pre-cable days, when reporters had to boil events down to the core facts and leave the opining to the Sunday talk shows.   The news channels have done much to bring the immediacy of world events into our homes, but they have also made it very easy for demagogues to spread mistruths, partial truths, and, occasionally, outright lies with little to check them.   With a few notable exceptions, analysis has been replaced by the simple presentation of opposing opinion, leaving it to the viewer to find the truth.

Luckily, some organizations (news and otherwise) have also developed “fact checker” services to help us sort out truth from misperception and misrepresentation.  Here are a few:

http://www.politifact.com/   Politifact.com is a service founded in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times that quickly evaluates the accuracy of political statements.  In 2009, it won a Pulitzer Prize for “separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.”  It has a “truth-o-meter,” a “Flip-o-meter,” and an “Obameter.”

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/category/fact-check/   CNN provides this service mainly to allow us to keep score on political speech.

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/ucs-fact-checker.html  The Union of Concerned Scientists uses its fact checker to try to keep public officials and politicians—but also the media—honest on all sorts of science issues, especially the environment.

http://www.factcheck.org/  This service is managed by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania that focuses on research in political communication, information and society, media and children, health communication, and adolescent communication.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker  Subtitled “The Truth Behind the Rhetoric,” this fact check blog from the Washington Post is written by Glenn Kessler, a veteran diplomatic correspondent who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and who has been with the Post since 1998.

Check these out and, if you know of other good fact checkers, please share them.