Title: L.A. Times’ Michael Hiltzik & Media Misreporting on Social Security (Part 1)
ANNOUNCER: It’s You Earned This, the Social Security and Medicare podcast, brought to you by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and now your host, Walter Gottlieb.
WALTER: Columnist Michael Hiltzik has spent more than 40 years writing for the Los Angeles Times, and one of the issues he cares most deeply about is Social Security. In his columns, Hiltzik pierces conservative proposals for cutting the program using a mixture of wit, data, and historical context. With the Social Security trustees just having issued their latest financial projections last week, and with the usual flood of gloom and doom headlines that followed, we thought, what better time to talk to the LA Times Pulitzer Prize winning writer to look beyond the hype for solutions that protect Americans’ earned benefits. Hello, Michael. How are you doing today?
MICHAEL HILTZIK: I’m good. How are you?
WALTER: I’m good, and it’s good to meet you face-to-face, at least virtually, after all these years.
MICHAEL HILTZIK: Same here.
WALTER: We appreciate all the writing that you do about Social Security and seniors’ issues. We follow it with great interest, and we admire your passion for the subject, and I would like to dive right in, if that’s okay.
MICHAEL HILTZIK: Sure, let’s go.
WALTER: Last week, the Social Security trustees issued their latest set of projections, and they basically said that the trust fund will not become depleted until 2035. They pushed the date back one year later, at which time Social Security could still pay 83% of benefits. Not a great scenario, but let me read you some of the headlines that we saw in the mainstream media the day after: Social Security and Medicare finances look grim as overall debt piles up — Washington Post, Social Security warning issued, headed for trouble — NEWSWEEK, Social Security expected to run short on funds — CNBC. So what did you think of those gloom and doom headlines?
MICHAEL HILTZIK: Well, I think I’ve written—I didn’t write it this year because I was actually away when the trustees’ report came out, but in previous years, I’ve written that the release of this report is always the occasion for an incredible outburst of inaccuracy and ignorance about Social Security and about Medicare and about the relationship such as it is between them. As you just indicated, this year was no exception. The Washington Post article that you read the headline of, the lede of the article says, “Social Security and Medicare will run out of money in just over a decade,” which is just flatly wrong by any definition of the question. It’s just wrong. And in fact, the rest of the article sort of, you know, as though the authors didn’t think about the rest of the article, contradicts what they say in the lede. But it’s the lede, that’s the impression that people will take away.
WALTER: We already sent off a letter to the editor about that article. So let’s see if they publish it from our president, Max Richtman. Why is it so misleading? The reporting that says Social Security is going broke or going bankrupt, just help tease it out for our listeners who may not understand the distinction?
MICHAEL HILTZIK: Yeah, I think that the basic problem that I’ve seen with journalism about these programs, and it’s not just Social Security and Medicare, I saw it a lot in the coverage of Obamacare. The basic problem is that these articles are written by reporters. They’re often written by reporters who are political reporters, who see everything through a partisan prism. And it’s easiest for them to just say, well, the Democrats say this, the Republicans say that, and toss it into the air and let readers choose their poison. So that’s one problem. Another is that I think we’ve seen an alarming surge of just sheer laziness on the part of reporters who are asked to write about these. My argument has always been that to write adequately about Social Security, you have to know the history of the program, you have to know the technicalities of the program. It’s so easy to just use these shibboleths and say, it’s running out of money, it’s going broke, what have you, much easier than to actually understand how Social Security is financed and what the history of its financing has been since 1935 and particularly since 1983. So that’s the challenge we have to correct the errors.
WALTER: And you and we both try so hard. The problem is it’s somewhat of an uphill battle because it seems to me, and let me know if you agree, that a lot of the mainstream media seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid from the conservative think tanks, which always talk about the necessity to cut benefits in order to strengthen Social Security. They never talk about the adequacy of benefits or the possibility of just raising revenue, which is verboten to them.
MICHAEL HILTZIK: I think that’s true. I don’t know if it’s simply drinking the right wing Kool-Aid, but I think this is another artifact of how little reporters understand about the program when they are writing about it. So I’ve written just untold times about how the trust funds are real money, what they’re made up of, how they are. I’ve written untold times about how Social Security does not have an impact on the general U.S. Treasury, and every time I write that, the next thing I know, the Washington Post is writing an article about how Social Security is affecting the budget and all this, and I’ve got to start all over again. So there are these ingrained impressions that, for some reason, so many reporters have that they cannot be weaned from.
WALTER: It’s really unfortunate, and your insights as to why are very interesting. Fiscal conservatives and some of the mainstream media, especially lately, have been conflating Social Security with the debt, which you just kind of alluded to. So they point out that the nation has mounting debt, and they blame Social Security for it, even though Social Security is self-financed by workers’ payroll contributions. What do you say to that argument, or the conflation of Social Security with the debt issue?
MICHAEL HILTZIK: Yeah, I’ve written about this so many times. Reporters don’t understand that there are these separate revenue streams, and the revenue stream for Social Security is sequestered, really, and it can only be used for Social Security, and it can only come from these two or three, I guess, revenue sources, the payroll tax, the trust fund and its interest, and interest and the income from the taxation Social Security benefits. So there’s no understanding of the distinction between Social Security, which whatever fiscal issues it has can be solved within its four walls, and Medicare, which is so sensitive to basically the cost of medical care and the way we pay for it and distribute it in the United States, which is a completely different issue. You can affect the fiscal situation of Medicare by clamping down on medical costs. Nobody understands that these are really two different things.
WALTER: You know, that’s a good point. I didn’t think about that so much, but they do lump them together a lot, both the print and the broadcast media, and you’re right, it isn’t that simple, and there’s plenty of things that could be done to bring down health care costs, but the political right doesn’t want to do those either, so that’s a whole other topic.
MICHAEL HILTZIK: Right, and in fact that Washington Post article that you read the headline of, the first line of it is: “Social Security and Medicare will run out of money in just over a decade.”
WALTER: And of course, just to make it crystal clear to the listener, the reason the run-out-of-money narrative is false is because they’re talking the trustees, are talking about the trust funds for Social Security and the trust fund for Medicare, Part A, hospital insurance. The programs themselves are going to continue to receive revenue from payroll taxes and, in Medicare’s case, payroll taxes and premiums.
MICHAEL HILTZIK: That’s right.
WALTER: One of the favorite conservative solutions for strengthening Social Security’s finances, if that’s what they’re really trying to do, let’s just say that’s what they’re really trying to do for argument’s sake, is raising the retirement age. It was already raised to 67 for those of us born in 1960 or later. Now the Republicans, or many Republicans, are proposing to raise it to 69 or 70. You wrote in A column last year: “raising the retirement age is the stupidest and most dishonest proposed fix for Social Security.” Explain why?
MICHAEL HILTZIK: Yeah, and I’ve written that column several times, I mean I made that point many times, it’s because the life expectancy is is dynamic and varied, and when the politicians say: let’s just raise it to, whatever, you know, 70. In fact, Nikki Haley, when she was on the stump, said: you know, gee, you know, retiring at 65 doesn’t make any sense. And she didn’t seem to understand that Social Security doesn’t have a 65-year-old retirement age.
WALTER: It’s 67 now, yeah.
MICHAEL HILTZIK: Right, and and for other baby boomers it’s 66, and change. Look, first of all, you know, this is also often paired with the the claim that when Social Security was created, the retirement age was deliberately set at 65 because the drafters figured that nobody makes it to 65, you know that the average life expectancy is less than 65, so that they were plotting to cheat everybody. And of course, we know that that’s simply not true.
WALTER: That’s not true, yeah.
MICHAEL HILTZIK: You know, I mean I’ve got you know on my computer and I’ve reproduced them, the life charts going back to the 30s, in fact they go back to the 19th century, but that life expectancy is very sensitive to factors like educational achievement, to income and to race, and that if you divide up the overall longevity life expectancy age, you can see, and you know these are published by the US government. The difference between white males, white females, black males, black females and and Hispanic males and females. And I should also say, not everybody lives there, spends their careers with their belly behind a desk in an air-conditioned office, and the life expectancy and the need for to retire is obviously very different between office workers and members of Congress and construction workers and menial workers of all of all sorts. So this is, you know, they say well, one size doesn’t fit all, but yet they want one retirement age and it makes no sense.
WALTER: And our experts tell me that if you raise the retirement age to 69, it turns out to be an almost 30% lifetime benefit cut, or maybe that’s at 70. But, the point is that’s worse than just letting the system, letting the trust fund, run dry and there be a 17% cut. So in other words, that solution to raise the retirement age would be more punitive than if the trust fund just ran out of money.
MICHAEL HILTZIK: That’s right. I think your organization and many others have basically done the math. In fact, Social Security Administration has done the math to say how much you give up by delaying or claiming early and what the impact would be of an overall increase in the retirement age.
WALTER: Well, Michael, we have run out of time for this episode, but we’re getting so much good content here that I’d like to have a part two with you, Michael Hiltzik, if you will rejoin us next time?
MICHAEL HILTZIK: Sure!
WALTER: And if you’d like to join us in protecting Americans earned benefits, visit ncpssm.org and click join. That’s ncpssm.org. Our engineer is Shahab Shokouhi. Our editor is Simon Laslo Janssen, who also composed our theme music. I’m Walter Gottlieb. See you next time and remember You Earned This!