{"id":1717675,"date":"2022-10-31T07:47:33","date_gmt":"2022-10-31T11:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1717675"},"modified":"2022-10-31T07:48:04","modified_gmt":"2022-10-31T11:48:04","slug":"math-denier-politico-reporter-smears-efforts-to-address-americas-ticking-fiscal-time-bomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/math-denier-politico-reporter-smears-efforts-to-address-americas-ticking-fiscal-time-bomb\/","title":{"rendered":"Math Denier: Politico Reporter Smears Efforts To Address America\u2019s Ticking Fiscal Time Bomb"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">26<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fmath-denier-politico-reporter-smears-efforts-to-address-americas-ticking-fiscal-time-bomb%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1717675&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Want to understand why our nation faces a $31 trillion national debt and few politicians willing to do something about it? A recent Politico <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2022\/09\/22\/republican-candidates-social-security-medicare-00058158\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">story<\/a> provides a helpful guide.<\/p>\n<p>While the press and the left (but I repeat myself) view catastrophic climate change as a certainty \u2014 a prism that makes leftists\u2019 big-government solutions to the \u201cclimate crisis\u201d plausible \u2014 it takes a far more skeptical tone toward conservative proposals for entitlement reform. In this vein, Natalie Allison\u2019s story about conservatives supporting the \u201cprivatization\u201d of Social Security and Medicare uses several tactics to marginalize lawmakers courageous enough to propose reforms that our country will need to remain solvent in future decades.<\/p>\n<p> <strong>Conflating \u2018Privatization\u2019 with Any Reforms<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>The article uses the word \u201cprivatization\u201d or some derivation thereof 21 times, while referencing the word \u201creform\u201d but once. At no point does Allison ever define or describe, even in general terms, what she means when using the word \u201cprivatization,\u201d or what the politicians who used it referred to.<\/p>\n<p>I would like to know exactly what specific proposal, or proposals, Allison references to debate these ideas on their merits or lack thereof. By failing to provide any details, Allison effectively uses \u201cprivatization\u201d as a general slur, to encompass any proposal for substantive changes to Medicare or Social Security.<\/p>\n<p>The fact that Allison also uses the word \u201ccuts\u201d provides some indication as to her intent. Leftist politicians use the word \u201ccut\u201d to describe any reduction in the <em>growth<\/em> of future spending \u2014 for instance, a hypothetical proposal that would reduce Medicare spending growth to 5 percent per year, instead of 7 percent. The fact that the article embraces these tropes, presupposing that government has some predetermined right to grow exponentially in perpetuity, indicates a partisan bias.<\/p>\n<p> <strong>Presenting Fact as Opinion<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>When talking about entitlement reform, Allison characterizes the reasons conservatives have proposed changes to Medicare and Social Security from a highly detached perspective: \u201cPrivatizing government entitlement programs has long been a policy goal for some segments of the Republican Party who worry about the federal deficit and the growing share of the federal budget those programs take up.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That detachment comes at a price of accuracy, for at no point in the article does Allison note that Medicare and Social Security face looming insolvency. In the case of Medicare, which is <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/06\/10\/fact-check-medicare-is-already-functionally-insolvent\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">already functionally insolvent<\/a>, the program\u2019s official insolvency will come within half a dozen years. So say the Medicare trustees, all of them Democrats, in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cms.gov\/files\/document\/2022-medicare-trustees-report.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">this year\u2019s report<\/a>. Allison presented a fact (i.e., entitlement insolvency) as an opinion held by \u201csome segments of the Republican Party,\u201d rather than an official projection made by the U.S. government and four officials appointed by President Biden and confirmed by a Democrat-controlled Senate.<\/p>\n<p>As a further thought experiment, substitute \u201centitlement reform\u201d with \u201cclimate change\u201d and \u201cRepublicans\u201d with \u201cDemocrats\u201d in the above passage. Does anyone believe a Politico reporter would take such a skeptical tone if the roles were reversed? \u201cLowering carbon emissions has long been a policy goal for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Politico uses several tactics to marginalize lawmakers courageous enough to propose reforms our country will need to remain solvent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":521,"featured_media":1717678,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1717675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1717675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1717678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1717675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1717675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1717675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}