Using the Young To Push Your Ideology
By Matt Zeitlin - Oct 22nd, 2008 at 2:40 pmRobert Samuelson has written one of the most annoying types of column today, one in which he self-righteously exhorts the young to march in lockstep behind his own agenda of cutting benefits and restricting eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. Before he suggests that we young people picket the AARP (seriously), he makes all sorts of misleading claims about how baby boomers are screwing us juveniles:
There are three basic ways of reducing the costs of Social Security and Medicare: increase eligibility ages; trim benefits; and require recipients to pay more for their Medicare benefits (higher premiums, co-payments or deductibles).
Samuelson is being tricky here.
It’s indeed true that at current cost projections “Social Security and Medicare” are not sustainable and that their costs need to be reduced. But “Social Security and Medicare” is not a single government program whose trust fund will go into the red all at once. Social Security is on a strong footing and its trust fund won’t run out until 2042, even using a conservative prediction of economic growth.
Medicare, on the other hand, is estimated to begin facing those problems in 2019. So why can’t Samuelson just be honest about our fiscal problems? One suspects that if he has to misrepresent the state of our entitlement programs to induce action in youth, then maybe the action he wants us to take isn’t such a great idea.
Also, his three methods of restricting Medicare costs are not very imaginaitive and don’t address why medicare costs are going up. Medicare costs are going up along with health care costs across the board. So just addressing Medicare without adressing health costs in general will accomplish nothing. If Samuelson had some ideas on that end–and plenty of health wonks are out there writing about them–then maybe we could take his plea for us youth to “get angry” because the country hasn’t adopted his views on entitlements a bit more seriously.
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