Tonight on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams introed a story about how Medicare spending is slowing somewhat by making it all about the inevitable insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. (I could not double-check or link to what Williams said, because it's not available on NBC's site, but I know what I heard.)
Inevitable insolvency only refers to the Medicare and Social Security trust funds, bulked up over the past 30 years with higher taxes on workers and employers in order to deal with the retirement of baby boomers, all of whom have been paying higher payroll taxes and getting benefit cuts for three decades.
But Williams asserted in his intro that the programs themselves are facing insolvency, not mentioning that that might implausibly happen in the not-very-near future of 2026 for the Medicare Trust Fund (a two-year improvement over the last report, thanks to Obamacare) and 2033 for the Social Security Trust Fund.
More, below.
Williams is a typical multi-millionaire Beltway journalist who slips Pete Peterson catfood prescriptions into most news items about the two most popular government programs ever.
And he, like most of the well-off Vilagers, never mentions that there are several catfood-free ways to ensure that Medicare and Social Security will provide decent benefits for seniors forever.
Like a full-employment economy with millions more paying payroll taxes than have been for the last five years.
Like raising the cap on who pays payroll taxes, ending the current obscenity in which a private equity vulture or hedge-fund stock speculator who makes $1 billion or more a year pays the same in payroll taxes as a two-worker family making $110,000 or so.
No, instead all we hear from the corporate media is the inevitable need to cut benefits and raise eligibility ages.
Shamefully, some Democrats, like President Obama and Sen. Durbin, have supported the Peterson catfood agenda.
Hopefully, most Democrats in the Senate have not.
We can't stop media millionaires doing the bidding of their billionaire employers.
But we must keep up the pressure on every elected Democrat in Washington, Obama most certainly included, to protect Medicare and Social Security from those who have always wanted to kill these essential and popular programs.