.....calling it an 'entitlement' and calling for both participants to 'fix' (cut) it.
The Final Presidential Debate Will Be Biased - Against Social Security:
Social Security is likely to be discussed during the segment of the debate dealing with the announced topic of “Debt and entitlements.” But that will neither answer Ellen’s question nor inform the American people. Calling Social Security an entitlement and asking about it in connection with the debt is biased. That biased framing is not what that the American people want answered; rather, it is what FOX News and its sponsors want asked.
The American people correctly understand that Social Security is an earned benefit. “Entitlement” sounds like a government handout that can be taken away at whim. Moreover, talking about Social Security, undifferentiated from Medicare and Medicaid, as an entitlement, is not clarifying but confusing. The three programs are designed for strikingly different purposes with different histories and different challenges. As for its supposed relationship to the federal debt, Social Security has no borrowing authority, is totally self-financing, and so doesn’t add a penny to the total federal debt. Indeed, it has a $2.8 trillion accumulated surplus. Cutting Social Security would not reduce the debt, only make that surplus larger.
Asking about Social Security as an entitlement supposedly adding to the debt simply reinforces decades-old false claims made by those who are intent on undermining Social Security. Although the Democratic Party, with its embrace of expanding, not cutting Social Security, now implicitly rejects the false, unstated contention that cutting Social Security will somehow reduce the nation’s debt, it is still the belief of much of the mainstream media. Implying that Social Security is part of the problem of the nation’s debt, and so, must be cut, is biased, uninformed, and uninformative.
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