Social Security in Perspective, Part III

A conversation with William Greider

By Trudy Lieberman
Columbia Journalism Review

Proposals to change the Social Security system have taken shape, and could foreshadow long-lasting effects on the program. Many of these call for substantial changes to Social Security, but the public largely has only a vague sense of how their benefits might change, both in the short term and the long term. Campaign Desk has for months urged a broader discussion of Social Security by the news media. Over the year the country’s elite news outlets and bloggers have carried on quite a conversation about the proposed changes—but how these proposals affect ordinary people has been largely absent from the discussion.

I sat down with longtime political reporter William Greider to find out why. Greider recently won the Nyhan Prize for political reporting, given by the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University. He is currently the national affairs correspondent for The Nation and has written about about Social Security for that publication. He has also worked for The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, and has written several best-selling books, including Who Will Tell the People: A Betrayal of American Democracy, which touches on the media’s role in American democracy.

Trudy Lieberman: What are we to make of this consensus on fixes to Social Security that some in the media tell us has been reached?

William Greider: This is a staggering scandal for the media. I have yet to see a straightforward, non-ideological, non-argumentative piece in any major paper that describes the actual condition of Social Security. The core fact is that Social Security has not contributed a dime to the deficit, but has piled up trillions in surpluses, which the government has borrowed and spent. Social Security’s surpluses have actually offset the impact of the deficit, beginning with Reagan.

(More here.)