Situation Room scaremongering: CNN's Social Security crisis

The August 5 reports from the Social Security and Medicare trustees declared Social Security's long-term financial outlook mostly unchanged from the previous year, and the projections for Medicare were greatly improved from previous forecasts. But on CNN's Situation Room, this news amounted to a crisis in Social Security and a threat to the country. On the August 5 broadcast, host Wolf Blitzer announced: "Social Security reaches the final financial tipping point. The system is now paying out more than it's taking in. Will Washington do anything anytime soon to fix this problem?" Blitzer was referring to the fact that this year Social Security is paying out more in benefits than it receives in tax revenue--a mostly meaningless fact, given the system's $2.5 trillion long-term surplus (CEPR's Social Security Byte, 8/5/10). But Blitzer turned to a single guest, Beltway fixture and former presidential adviser David Gergen, to echo his alarmism. "We're getting disturbing numbers now once again on Social Security," Blitzer declared. "We seem to be getting these every few years, and people sort of just kick this can down the road." Gergen responded that government debt will "seriously threaten the future of the country." He acknowledged that the trustees' reports suggest the programs are "in good shape," but as a self-described "deficit hawk," he still saw a crisis looming, since "the government is going to have to put more and more money into it...and therefore, the cost to government will go way up and the size of the national debt is going to continue to go up." When Gergen says that the government is going to "put more and more money" into Social Security, he means that the government is going to start paying back some of the trillions of dollars it has borrowed from the Social Security system. He and Blitzer see this as a crisis; others would see it rather as the deserved and anticipated return of enormous amounts of wealth to the working people who contributed to the surplus over the last three decades, specifically so that it could be paid back now as the baby boomers begin to retire. Gergen complained: The liberals have seized on this new report about Social Security and Medicare, these reports, and said we don't need to touch these, they're solvent. Go away, don't do this. But the deficit hawks are saying, wait a minute. If you don't deal with Medicare and Social Security, if you don't reform them, the deficit is going to go higher and higher. The national debt is going to reach proportions we can't stand, and it's going to bring all sorts of problems to the country.