Democratic Podcast: Bush Plans Benefit Cuts

Saturday's Democratic response to the presidential radio address was delivered by Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. For the third straight week, the topic is President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security.

A transcript of Stabenow's remarks:

Hello. I'm Senator Debbie Stabenow.

Social Security reflects the best of American values. It's a promise our government makes to all Americans that if you work hard and play by the rules, you'll be able to count on a basic quality of life and dignity in your older years.

Social Security is not a handout. It's a benefit that Americans earn by working hard all their lives and paying into the system.

But Social Security is about more than retirement, it's America's insurance policy. It protects you whether you're a 22-year-old just starting your career, or you're a 75-year-old enjoying retirement.

It's not just about tomorrow, it's about today.

Social Security covers you if you lose a parent, or if you become disabled.

Social Security is the great American success story.

Before Social Security, 50 percent of older Americans were living in poverty. Now, it's only 10 percent. If that's not a success story, I don't know what is.

Some claim that Social Security is in crisis, but let's look at the facts.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports Social Security can pay 100 percent of its commitments until the year 2052 -- almost 50 years.

Still, the program does face long-term challenges, and we should act to strengthen and improve the program for the long term.

Democrats want to be a part of that effort, and it will require some hard choices. But to provide some perspective, the projected long-term Social Security shortfall is only one fifth, or 20 percent, the cost of the tax breaks enacted by President Bush.

Democrats look forward to receiving a detailed Social Security proposal from President Bush. But we're concerned by some recent leaks from the White House.

A memo prepared by an administration official suggests President Bush will push a privatization plan with deep cuts in benefits. These cuts would be as high as 25 percent for some current workers, and 45 percent for retirees in the future. And the benefit cuts would apply to all seniors, even those who choose not to invest in privatized accounts.

America's insurance policy was never meant to be a privatized 401-K plan, or a high-risk investment. It was meant to be the secure foundation for your retirement.

I remember the looks on the faces of Enron employees, many with tears in their eyes, who told me, "Thank God for Social Security, it's all I have left."

Beyond its deep benefit cuts and added risks, privatization also would substantially add to the National Debt. Our nation already is staggering under the largest budget deficit in the history of the country.

Taking on even more debt could destabilize financial markets, drive up interest rates, and stifle economic growth. It also would force our children and grandchildren to bear the burdens of more debt and higher taxes.

When I think about my own children and all young Americans across our country who have hopes and expectations for a secure financial future, I cannot imagine piling even more debt onto their shoulders.

Democrats hope that the president will reject privatization schemes that would require deep benefit cuts and massive increases in the National Debt.

We want to work with the president to strengthen and improve the program.

Senator Max Baucus, our senior member on the Finance Committee, will be leading our caucus on this issue.

Democrats look forward not only to making Social Security more secure, but to developing new and innovative ways to promote savings in addition to Social Security.

Too few Americans are saving for their future, and we must address that. It's simply not enough to maintain the status quo.

Democrats are committed to keeping the security in Social Security. At the same time, we want to look to the future to create new ways for Americans to build wealth and retirement security, because every working American deserves a secure retirement.

I'm Senator Debbie Stabenow. Thank you for listening.

I have trouble believing that Americans will let President Bush make changes to Social Security that would cut benefits to retirees in the near term and solve no long-term issues.

But it's a huge mistake to think privatization won't happen. As Bush's second term begins this week, no one should misunderstimate his ability to steer the ship of state towards an iceberg.

Three numbers for anyone who believes there's an imminent danger to Social Security that must be addressed today with the most radical changes in the history of the program:

Cost Estimates over the Next 75 Years

• Social Security trust fund shortfall, predicted to begin in 2042 or 2052: $3.7 trillion


• Bush's Medicare prescription drug benefit: $8.1 trillion


• Bush's tax cuts, if made permanent: $11.6 trillion

Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank

Politics · Podcasts · 2005/01/18 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

With all the accusations of bias and sloppy war reporting, the New York Times doesn't get enough credit for being the weirdest newspaper in America.

Reviewer Ned Martel on the PBS cooking show Everyday Food:

[Co-host Allie Lewis] demonstrates a forced beginner's pluck, and she reveals a brittleness when she's trying to be soft. When musing over her al dente sautéed snap peas and radishes, she takes a moment to mock her mom's lifelong preference for canned vegetables: "In fact, my mother would probably consider this raw." She later disses her dad's delusions of grandeur as a green thumb, and confesses her struggles to wean herself from butter, a predilection that was hard won at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. (La pauvre!)

Journalism · 2005/01/18 · 1 COMMENT · Link

A Text Ad By Any Other Name

Zephyr Teachout on politics:

It's the most imperfect art, and you really have to get down in the gutter. I love how, at the same time that it's just this ugly sport, at the core its aspirations are so high. Listening to so many different people express their political views is very moving. We're political animals. I like that -- 'political animals' -- it expresses it in one phrase. The highest and the lowest.

To call attention to yesterday's entry on Teachout, I bought a Google text ad keyed to her name:

Zephyr Blows
Fact-checking the claim that Dean
bribed two liberal bloggers
cadenhead.org/workbench

A few people think this is a low blow, so I'm bringing it up for discussion here.

I bought the ad to redress a libel. People who search Google for her name this weekend are highly likely to be looking for one thing: The dirt on her inflammatory claim to have explicitly bought good press for the Dean campaign from Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong. I think the facts deserve as wide an airing as possible.

Right-wing ideologues will be riding this smear for days. First Bill O'Reilly, Robert Novak, and Hugh Hewitt this weekend; next Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on their radio shows tomorrow.

No other search terms are as directly associated with this controversy as her name. When it blows over in a few days, the ad will of course be dropped.

I'll admit that the choice of headline, which I also used here, is playing hardball. Jeff Jarvis might even say that it's (gasp) uncivilized.

But I think it's time that liberals learned from the Swift Boat veterans and their amphibious assault on Kerry's war record. The Dukakis doctrine doesn't work: If you ignore scurrilous and irresponsible attacks in the belief that people are too reasonable to give them credence, you're going to get beaten like a drum.

Politics · 2005/01/16 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

The breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston is no longer Kent Brownridge's tsunami.

After his remark spanned the globe, the Us Weekly parent company exec has issued a mea stupida:

I used an inappropriate metaphor and I'm sorry that I in any way compared a monumental tragedy in human life to this. ... I wish I'd said that this was our equivalent of covering the presidential election.

2005/01/14 · Comment · Link

Blogger Payments No Kos for Alarm

A Wall Street Journal story and the invisible backhand of the blogosphere are attempting to make the publishers of Daily Kos and MyDD the liberal versions of Armstrong "No Bribe Left Behind" Williams:

Howard Dean's presidential campaign hired two Internet political "bloggers" as consultants so that they would say positive things about the former governor's campaign in their online journals, according to a former high-profile Dean aide.

There's no comparison between these situations. Jerome Armstrong stopped weblogging during the contract. Daily Kos publisher Markos Moulitsas disclosed his professional relationship with the Dean campaign from the moment it began, and did so prominently: Take a look at Daily Kos from June 2003 to see the disclaimer directly below the site's logo.

When the Journal declares breathlessly that the issue "shook the confidence of many people in the blogosphere," I wish they had named some of these delicate flowers.

Surely there aren't many people precocious enough to believe, as Jeff Jarvis apparently does, that webloggers are completely blind to the persuasive power of money.

(What other troubling revelations lie in store for such naifs? My employees laugh at my jokes even when they aren't funny. These pants make me look fat, but everyone is afraid to tell me. Size does matter.)

Political campaigns threw a lot of money at webloggers last year, mostly in the form of ads -- of course they were hoping to get a little editorial appreciation as a two-fer.

Taking ethical correctness to the point of ridiculousness, Roger L. Simon calls Moulitsas a hack for taking campaign money:

I never would accept money from any party or candidate to front for them on this blog. Of course that's easy to say because nobody ever asked me. Nevertheless, I thought the whole point of blogging is not selling out to anyone on your blog, not even an editor or a publisher. The minute you do that you might as well chuck it in.

Simon makes his living outside of politics and writes for National Review (describing its editor as an articulate spokeswoman). I can see why he defines integrity by his refusal to accept money from political entities, just as Bill Bennett defines immorality as every vice other than gambling.

Many webloggers write about subjects that relate to their professional careers. That's one of the best reasons to read them: Someone who spends 60 hours a week yoked to a compiler is a go-to source for coding insight. An NBA owner knows how the ball bounces.

A weblogger who works as a political consultant should not be expected to quit his job to prove his editorial integrity. Though as it turns out, Moulitsas did -- he doesn't need consulting gigs now that BlogAds drives a money truck to his house every month.

Unless you believe that an ethical weblog requires that its author stop making a living, the standard should be to disclose financially entangling relationships, not avoid them entirely. Let the readers decide if the dollars lining your pockets have turned you into a walking, talking infomercial.

Speaking of which, I give all of my books four stars.

Publishing · Politics · Journalism · 2005/01/14 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

Kent Brownridge, general manager of Us Weekly parent company Wenner Media, on the breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston:

For a celebrity weekly, this is our tsunami.

It's a good thing he didn't describe it as "our 9/11." That would be in poor taste.

Publishing · 2005/01/12 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Remove the Blog from Thine Eye

In a letter to the media news site Romenesko, Rob Walsh pops the hype balloon of weblogs, describing them as "nothing more than the Web's version of talk radio."

If weblogs are talk radio, as Walsh derides, they are talk radio in which every caller has his own show. The global reach and lack of barriers set them apart.

Unlike every other mass medium, the Web doesn't let giant corporations hog the mike. A former CBS gift shop employee who never went to college has a bigger online audience than CBS News. An obscure reporter from Wisconsin is now a media institution.

Journalists should be paying attention to weblogs, if for no other reason than enlightened self-interest. A cloud of webloggers can descend upon questionable reporting like locusts, leaving nothing but devastation and droppings behind in their wake.

Last March, Tim Blair, a weblogger in Sydney, Australia, read a quote in a Chicago Tribune piece he thought was too good to be true:

"These people always complain," said Graham Thorn, a psychiatrist. "They want it both ways: their way and our way. They want to live in our society and be respected, yet they won't work. They steal, they rob and they get drunk. And they don't respect the laws."

As the Tribune later admitted, reporter Uli Schmetzer fabricated the name and occupation of the source. They ended his nearly 20-year association with the paper.

In announcing Schmetzer's fabrication, Tribune Public Editor Don Wycliff noted wryly that Blair "seems to have set himself up as a kind of independent monitor of the press."

The experience with Schmetzer convinced Wycliff that weblogs represent a new check on the media: "In the past, national and foreign correspondents could roam the country or the world writing stories about people who would never see their work. In the Internet age, there are fewer and fewer places where the Chicago Tribune -- or the Waxahachie Daily Light, for that matter -- cannot be accessed and read critically by people about whom we write."

Could "Tim in Sydney" call a talk radio show in Australia and get a reporter fired in Chicago?

Journalism · 2005/01/11 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

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