Getting Personal over Personal
Accounts:
Business Week attacks the
ownership society with scare tactics and liberal talking points.
By
Charles Simpson
May 13, 2005
To discredit the presidents vision of
an ownership society, Business Weeks Lee Walczak and Richard S.
Dunham spread economic doom and gloom and painted an inaccurate
picture of the political landscape of Social Security reform. They
warned of rampant job insecurity, the offloading of personal
responsibility onto individuals, the excesses of capitalism, and
even took gratuitous shots at the president. Their May 16, 2005
piece, I Want My Safety Net, relied heavily on liberal think tanks
and talking points to eschew economic reality.
Here are some of the more obvious problems with the
piece:
-
An Extreme Example: To explain why so
many Americans arent buying into Bushs Ownership Society, the
feature story started with a Philadelphia waiter who had a brush
with President Bushs Ownership Society. A poster child against
personal accounts, George Silli, saw the value of his mutual
funds drop by 60%. The article called him a political
independent, but he advocated for universal, government-mandated,
heath insurance: a decidedly liberal position. Like many seniors
who will be exempt from Social Security reform (and the AARP), he
stridently opposed personal accounts.
-
Polling for Bias: A poll from the Civil
Society Institute, a left-wing think tank outside Boston, was used
to justify the articles unsubstantiated rationalizations behind
the publics demand for failing government programs like Social
Security and universal health care. CSI has criticized the
president for his global warming policy and position on stem cell
research. The authors also relied on data from the left-leaning
Pew Research Center to make the case that at the core of Safety
Net Nation are white men comprising the presidents electorate.
Walczak and Dunham claimed that roughly 40% of Bushs votes came
from Safety Net voters who have soured on Wall Street and
dislike the Presidents approach to Social Security.
-
Talking Down the Economy: Walczak and
Dunham labeled two straight years of positive job growth (more
than three million new jobs) with unemployment at 5.2 percent an
era of rampant job insecurity. Despite the admitted recovery from
the tech bubble, they described the ownership society as a dire
place. They wrote, As income volatility has grown, government
prodded by free market Republicans out to reverse the New Deal-
has been offloading ever more responsibility onto individuals.
Walczak and Dunham were unclear about what responsibility has
been unloaded onto individuals by government and didnt cite any
examples. Outside of highly successful welfare reforms, Congress
hasnt curtailed any spending on entitlements or rolled back any
program for sake of a free market solution.
-
Social Insecurity over Individual Ownership:
They continued, While federal spending on the safety net for the
poor has grown briskly, it hasnt kept pace with societys needs.
Why? Because, Medicare is straining to cover seniors bills, and
some states are downsizing Medicaid programs. Walczak and Dunham
ignored the reasons behind Medicare and Medicaids problems, since
they undermined their own argument about the primacy of the safety
net over individual responsibility. These entitlement programs
are inefficient and too expensive. According to the National
Center for Policy Analysis, by 2020, 25 percent of all federal
income taxes will pay for Medicare; that figure will increase to
50 percent of federal income taxes by 2040.
-
Poisoning the Well: Walczak and Dunham
held up President Bush as a hypocritical advocate of the ownership
society, claiming his connections invalidated his experience. But
as the scion of an aristocratic Eastern dynasty, the budding young
tycoon always had a network of family friends and relations to
call on. Those golden connections bailed George W. out of his
early forays into the oil business. They implied that the
president wouldnt know the first thing about the pitfalls of the
ownership society. After all, not everyone has the luxury of a
golden parachute to protect them from what Walczak and Dunham in
one passage called the excesses of capitalism.
-
Wary of Wall Street: According to
BusinessWeek, riskaphobia has taken hold of the Social Security
debate. Walczak and Dunham tied the failure of government
entitlements like TennCare, Tennessees defunct universal
healthcare program, to the reason so many people are wary of
investment risk. Because of welfare reform and the out-of-control
costs of government entitlement programs, investors were more
likely to perceive investment as risky. A political scientist at
UC-Santa Cruz, Eva Bertram, piled on by claiming the public is
leery of becoming more dependent on the market. According to the
Business & Media Institute study, Biased Accounts, exaggerating the
risk of the stock market is a common problem in the media.
The reality is that, for pensioners in
Chile, the ownership society has been incredibly lucrative. In a
December 1, 2004 op-ed for the New York Times, Jose Pinera, Chiles
former secretary of labor and social security, wrote that, When the
system was inaugurated, one-fourth of the eligible work force signed
up in the first month. Today 95 percent of covered workers
participate. For Chileans, their retirement accounts represent real
property rights.
Pinera explained that since the system started on May
1, 1981, the average real return on the personal accounts has been
10 percent a year. The pension funds have now accumulated resources
equivalent to 70 percent of gross domestic product, a pool of
savings that has helped finance economic growth.
Walczak and Dunham said nothing about this amazing
success in Chile and how it could be realized in the United States.
Instead of facts and figures, the duo peddled skepticism and
condescension towards Americans and the free market system. Still,
they offered one groundbreaking solution from those thinking on a
larger scale. Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker and Peter
Orszag at the Brookings Institution had a revolutionary idea: a
universal family savings account which would be regulated by the
government and administered by the private sector. Unfortunately,
Hacker and Orszag dont get to the bank often. Anyone can obtain
such a savings account at their local bank or credit union.
According to the Business & Media Institute study,
Biased Accounts, this sort of political bias and economic
ignorance is rampant in the network media. Instead of accurate and
balanced reporting on economic issues, the media gives short shrift
to the presidents plans for Social Security. However, Walczak and
Dunham take their bias a step further to craft a serrated seven-page
hit piece. BusinessWeeks readers deserve better.
