Friday, February 22, 2013

David Brooks reiterates multiple entitlement fallacies. No one cares.

I've covered this many times.  Once again, on PBS' News Hour David Brooks has repeated the fallacy of commingling Social Security and Medicare as contributing to the US debt.  There are certainly parts of Medicare that contribute to the federal debt -- most notably the Medicare Drug benefit expansion by Republicans -- but Social Security does not contribute a single cent towards the federal debt.

It is asinine for the media to continue to allow this fallacy to fester.  Stop it, already.

The second fallacy?  That medical costs are out of control.  In part because of the 2009 ACA (Obamacare) passage, Medicare costs are slowing down, such that the CBO has revised its baseline downward.  But wait, President Obama's former OMB Director, Peter Orzag, told us so in 2011.  And he told us again, at the end of last year.

Why won't anyone excoriate him and his ilk for repeating these fallacies ad nauseum?

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