For as long as I've been around, I have frequently written that the American people are among the most propagandized of all in the world.
Here is one fellow's experience with America's corporate media, which supports my belief.
Here is one fellow's experience with America's corporate media, which supports my belief.
Here's one of the reasons why he is in this predicament.
Basil, I strongly agree with you on propaganda, but the interview you posted shows both sides ignoring facts pretty much at will.
ReplyDeleteUygur's numbers were accurate at one point but most economists now agree that the projections were over-optimistic. I think the official "run out of money" date is now 2027 but the day of reckoning is MUCH sooner.
The problem is that around 2019 Social Security stops contributing its excess to the US government and starts sucking in cash from the rest of the US government. The 2019 estimate, by the way, is the best case. As the Republican mentions, the problem started occurring this year and will get worse if the federal and state governments cut spending as now seems inevitable.
The US government has enjoyed the best of all possible worlds for the last 35+ years. It has huge obligations but it also has a secret income stream by transferring the Social Security and Medicare surpluses to the general government fund using with Treasury Bonds. This gave the government a two-fer. First it got the cash it needed right away. Second it had a predictable buyer for US government debt which kept interest rates lower than they otherwise would be.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Medicare hit the break-even point in 2005 and is now forcing the US government to raise an extra $150 billion per year to keep the program solvent. That number is going up fast and is going to go up a lot faster as the baby boomers retire.
This year Social Security is doing the same thing, which is part of why we've got a record deficit in a so-called expansion.
But there's a subtle but nasty corollary here. The Federal government has taken a double whack on the money it borrows. Not only does it not have Medicare and Social Security NOT buying debt anymore, it has to raise extra debt to keep those programs solvent.
Normally we'd see interest rates soar as the US government keeps offering more and more treasury bonds that fewer and fewer people want to buy but Europe and China are doing their absolute best to make US government debt the best deal in the world. But that won't always be true and then our roosters will truly come home to roost.
A big problem with these estimates is that they assume the US economy will grow at 3-4%. The historic average over the last 50 or so years is more like 2%. It doesn't seem like much, but that is a huge difference with tremendous compounding effects on large programs like SS and the tax base in general. Over-optimistic growth projections is also a problem with plans to reduce the deficit.
ReplyDeleteFor example, if tax rates remain stable, increase along with GDP and the government gets $100k in tax revenue (just as an example), then a 2% growth rate gets you $148k in 20 years while a 4% rate gets you $220k. Expand those numbers into the trillions of dollars and a small change in the US growth rate (or rate of growth for a large program like SS or Medicare) and the effect can be hundreds of billions.
Also, I've spent a lot of time traveling around the world and I don't think the US is the most propagandized. I think the Arab world wins that one hands down.
The US government has enjoyed the best of all possible worlds for the last 35+ years. It has huge obligations but it also has a secret income stream by transferring the Social Security and Medicare surpluses to the general government fund using with Treasury Bonds. This gave the government a two-fer. First it got the cash it needed right away. Second it had a predictable buyer for US government debt which kept interest rates lower than they otherwise would be.
ReplyDeleteNot only that, Pluto, but it also allowed Congress to keep tax rates lower than they would otherwise be which will end up increasing the tax burden on future generations.
Based on my experience in Egypt I absolutely agree with Andy about propaganda in the Arab world.
ReplyDeleteE.g. When the governor of South Sinai wanted to deflect criticism over a shark attack in Sharm El Sheikh he claimed there was an Israeli plot to destroy the tourism industry using GPS-controlled sharks.
How about "the most least-obviously propagandized"?
ReplyDeleteI think the difference is that in places like Egypt or Russia/the Soviet Union most people know on some level that the "news" they get is bullshit. Their default setting is skepticism to anything coming out of the official media.
Here in the U.S., tho, we like to tell ourselves that we have a "free press"...so we tend to buy into the probity of the talking heads, and as a result tend to buy into their message more.
I think the end results are similar, except the Arab world (and this goes for a hell of a lot of Asia, too...) tends to be full of the most unlikely rumors due to the accepted unreliability of the public press. So people start speculating and just make up stories, some of which sound ridiculous to us.
But I think our ridiculous is here, just on a more subtle level, like buying into the propaganda featured in this interview. It SOUNDS so reasonable until, as Pluto and Andy have here, you start looking at the hard numbers.
And, of course, the other thing is the vast difference in power and influence. What Egyptians do only really matters to Egypt, or possibly to their neighbors like Sudan, Israel, and Libya. What the U.S. public does or doesn't do affects a hell of a lot of the entire globe...
Pluto:
ReplyDeleteUygur's numbers were accurate at one point but most economists now agree that the projections were over-optimistic. I think the official "run out of money" date is now 2027 but the day of reckoning is MUCH sooner.
Sources would be welcome, not "most economists now agree".
Krugman is not saying this, and also that tweaks made now for SS would extend its viability years after "MUCH sooner".
Nick L:
Based on my experience in Egypt I absolutely agree with Andy about propaganda in the Arab world.
And I'd put up things Fox News USA has broadcast up against anything you may put up from Egypt.
Birther's, Death Panels, Mosques on Ground Zero, ad nauseam, anyone?
Hi, Nick. You're new here? I haven't seen you around before.
bb
Chief--
ReplyDeleteWhile the default reaction among the educated upper and (very small) middle classes is certainly skepticism, the masses of poor are more inclined to swallow the party line, or like you said, stitch together a patchwork of propaganda and rumor. It's certainly not as slick as our media's propaganda, but given the country's demographics it's still very effective at maintaining intellectual paralysis. It will be interesting to see whether what is now a free(er) press makes any progress on this front, at least in terms of doing actual analysis.
Regardless you make a very good point about power and influence--what happens in Egypt indeed has very little impact outside the region, with the possible exception of the flow of traffic through the Suez Canal.
bb--
I certainly can't argue with you there.
Speaking of Fox and Egypt, did you ever see anything on Fox's Middle East map-making adventures? Always good for a chuckle: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/31/fox-news-cant-find-egypt-map_n_816540.html
And yep I'm new. seydlitz commented on one of my blog posts a while back and I have been following the posts here for a few weeks... didn't comment till yesterday. A lot of good discussion going on it seems. I was curious how this group got together...
Nick: I think to a great extent the acceptance the average fellahin for the official news line depends on the subject. What I noticed when I was there was that Joe Egyptian troop tended to buy into the "foreign" news more than the domestic, usually because the Egyptian news broadcasts tended to play towards their prejudices. Just as FOX News slants their reportage so as to appeal to the mouthbreathing racist anti-gummint crowd, the Egyptian reports of naked American hootchie mamas and vile Jewish spies were more palatable to the average Egyptian, who was already predisposed to think of Americans as sluts and gangsters and Israelis as spies and...well, responsible for all the Evil in the World.
ReplyDeleteBut when something would come up about some Egyptian power player...they would scoff and make some comment about how this or that guy was paying off the Mubaraks or banging someone's niece and that was how they did that deal.
I'd scoff, except I think the typical American's deal - being LESS cynical about ourselves while being just as ignorant about foreigners - is probably more harmful to ourselves and our republic than theirs...
Chief--
ReplyDeleteAh, you nailed the nuance of it perfectly.
So why are Americans less cynical?
To me the solution to lunatic media is critical thinking. Plenty of Americans are educated enough to do it. Why don't they? A potent combination of apathy and sipping too much American Dream Kool-Aid? That would be my guess...
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ReplyDeleteChief:
ReplyDeleteIsraelis as spies
There's a story that the Kiwi's unearthed a couple of them digging out some wreakage from their recent Christchurch earthquake.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/07/19/501364/main20080907.shtml
bb
basil; the Egyptians told this great story about how this Israeli kid is smuggled into Cairo as a baby by a family of Egyptian Jews, is raised as Egyptian, becomes and Army officer, infiltrates the Mukabarat, ends up in the most exclusive, top-secret intelligence cabal in Egypt...and discovers that every one else there is a Mossad agent, too.
ReplyDeleteThe Mossad is EVERYwhere...
BB: ""Sources would be welcome, not "most economists now agree".
ReplyDeleteKrugman is not saying this, and also that tweaks made now for SS would extend its viability years after "MUCH sooner"."
I made my off-the-cuff remark based on memory, which is a lot more fallible than it was 40 years ago.
So I went digging in the archives and found that the issue was really hot in 2008-09 (election time, anybody?) and but has since dropped off the radar screen. This is a crying shame because the issue's gotten MUCH worse than it was back then.
Allan Sloan lives on the edge of the Washington crowd which means that his solutions don't typically make as much sense as you'd wish but he does a good job of describing the problem.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/18/news/economy/sloan_socialsecurity.fortune/index.htm
Here's something more recent from the NY Times that discusses part of my cynicism towards the Social Security and Medicare projections.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/the-real-social-security-and-medicare-problemand-a-doable-fix/
Short version, everything will be fine as long as we raise taxes. Which ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
Another part of my cynicism is that Congress passed a law in 1997 that required the Social Security Administration to assume an unrealistically high GDP growth percentage. I can't find a reference for it right now. But I did stumble over a statement from the SSA, itself.
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/index.html
The money statement is here: "This deficit is expected to shrink to about $20 billion for years 2012-2014 as the economy strengthens. After 2014, cash deficits are expected to grow rapidly as the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers."
Translation from actuarial speak: WASF!
I suspect Krugman is not saying anything right now because he's so focused on keeping discretionary spending up.
P.S. - When I said "Translation from actuarial speak: WASF!", I was overstating the case.
ReplyDeleteSocial Security isn't in very good shape, but it is MUCH better off than Medicare. That's truly scary, especially if Obamacare gets totally or partially dismantled.
one of my favorite stops on the web is driftglass, who usually offers "commentary", I suppose you could call it, on the weekly "mouse circus"( because Disney owns ABC which does the Sunday AM show "This Week" ).
ReplyDeleteThis week is no different.
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2011/07/voice-of-empire-ctd_24.html
My instincts tells me what we were really witnessing was an all-hands-on-deck "Fuck You" by our corporate owners to President Obama's very mild and loooooong overdue breaching of the "fourth wall" of Villager Lying -- "Whilst thou may beat on Dirty Fucking Hippies for imaginary sins all the live long day, Thou Shalt NEVER point out that the Right is always fucking wrong"(from President Obama's White House news conference.):
{ begin quote }Last point I’ll make here. I mean, I’ve gone out of my way to say that both parties have to make compromises. I think this whole episode has indicated the degree to which at least a Democratic President has been willing to make some tough compromises. So when you guys go out there and write your stories, this is not a situation where somehow this was the usual food fight between Democrats and Republicans. A lot of Democrats stepped up in ways that were not advantageous politically. So we’ve shown ourselves willing to do the tough stuff on an issue that Republicans ran on.{ end quote }
Sunday's Mouse Circus was our Villagers' way of leaving a video horse head in his bed: a reminder that, as long a they control the media, that message will never be allowed.
And as an extra bonus coup de grace to any Liberals who still watch this criminally dishonest drivel, the only remotely Left-leaning voice was on teevee anywhere today was Davos diva, content-thief and the Establishment's safe "liberal" media mogul
{ embedded pix }
Arianna Huffington.
Propaganda, lies, distortions.
No wonder we're in the condition we're in.
bb
There is a great bit of dialogue in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", where the Union of Philosophers, Soothsayers and Other Thinking People threatens to go on strike. They are asked the question, "And who will that inconvenience?"
ReplyDeleteAs I look at all the battle royale on Social Security, I have to ask myself, are the ones making the biggest argument currently inconvenienced by the tax levy, and are their future plans such that insolvency will inconvenience them in their "Golden Years"? It's a bit paradoxical that the cure for any and all ills in a program to provide a modicum of income for the elderly is to provide an even more paltry level of income for the elderly. Means testing I could understand. Someone with a $150,000/ per year income in retirement does not need Social Security to stay afloat.
We hear claims that Social Security was never intended to be more than a "Safety Net", yet the program's opposition never defines what is the level that represents that net.
We see all sorts of number crunching, but no mention of persons. It's a SOCIAL PROGRAM, not an business or investment scheme. SOCIAL PROGRAMS are a society's general sacrifice for the greater good.
I don't give a crap about what FDR had in mind. Tell me, Congressman Ryan, what do you have in mind for the person who worked 45 years at or close to minimum wage, in a job without a pension plan? Before you say they could have had an IRA, do the math of what such a worker can really put aside for the future, and how much future it will finance. I have, and it's truly depressing. One clown who supports ending Soc Sec said, "Even if they can just put away $5 per week, it will provide for their future." Do the math!
Sadly, it's much easier to demonstrate mathematical deficits and bankruptcy than moral deficits and bankruptcy.
Hello Pluto
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't put much credence into Allan Sloan, the guy behind your cnn money link.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh080609.shtml
In fact, I wouldn't put much credence into cnn as a whole either.
bb
Eh, anybody who writes lots will make some sort of a stupid mistake every once in a while. The more important thing is to figure out whether the guy is right about Social Security and I believe he is.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I agree with you on CNN but we're running out of semi-objective news sources so I continue to use it if nothing better is available.
No he isn't.
ReplyDeleteHe's the type who puts on the fright wig and hops about yelling "booga booga booga" to any and all who come near.
"The money's not there!! It's all IOUs!!"
bb