As expected, last night President Bush talked at great length about his plans to overhaul Social Security, all the while skirting over the difficult questions of potential costs and cuts. Earlier yesterday a “senior administration official” provided a background briefing that actually went into the nitty-gritty details of the president’s plan. One of those details is the astronomical cost of transforming the Social Security system to one that includes private investment accounts for individuals. That cost refers to the money that would, immediately and over the long term, be put into the Social Security system to make up for the tax dollars that would be diverted into private accounts instead of going to pay current retirees.
All along the press has been citing estimates that measure these transition costs at $1-2 trillion. These estimates come directly from a report prepared for the president by the Social Security Actuaries. Since one or two trillion dollars isn’t exactly a sum thrown around at the poker table, the “senior administration official” briefing the press stayed away from those numbers and chose instead to peg the transition costs at $664-754 billion. How does $1 to $2 trillion turn into $700 billion overnight? Very easily — by only counting the potential costs between 2009, when the program would begin, to 2015.
Clearly, the low-ball estimate was an attempt to keep the high figure, or any mention of long-term costs, out of the newspapers.
And, for once, it didn’t work. Bush’s careful passing over of the estimated transition costs were called out universally by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, as well as countless other papers.
Yet not all did an adequate job of shooting down the background-briefing figure of $664 billion.
Some like the AP’s Laura Meckler (and David Espo, whose name appeared on the first version of the story) simply wrote that the administration “pegged [the costs] at $750 billion over a decade” and left it at that.
Still others included the larger $1-2 trillion figure but, in a reflex action borne of habit, caged it in a “he said/she said” format. For instance, in an extensive fact-check of the president’s plan, USA Today‘s William M. Welch wrote:
The White House estimates that setting up private accounts would cost $754 billion from its start in 2009 through 2015. Democrats such as Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., say that understates the eventual cost of $2 trillion or more over the following decade. That transition cost would add to the $7.6 trillion national debt.
Hiding behind the safety of attribution, Welch bleeds authority from the undisputed $2 trillion figure by attributing it solely to a Democrat. If Welch had added that the number comes from the Social Security Trustees, that would have more weight with the reader and could not as easily be dismissed as partisan bickering. (To his credit, Welch did do his readers a service by writing about Social Security in the context of the growing national debt.)
Still, overall, the press did a remarkable job parsing the Social Security plan and pointing out true costs and intentional omissions. From regular news stories to stand-alone fact-check pieces like Welch’s, this time few reporters were asleep at the switch. And an attentive citizen who picked up his or her morning paper stood a relatively decent chance of getting more than just administration rhetoric.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.