Sunday, March 06, 2005
False Equivalency Syndrome Strikes Again
The Minneapolis StarTribune's Eric Black has an article on the Social Security privatization battle in today's paper. Black dutifully does the false-equivalency bit, in laying out the arguments for the pro and con sides as if they were of equal validity. In order to do that, he has to leave out a few key facts: 1) He doesn't mention the double-talk used by the privatization people, who use unrealistically low "Forever Bear" economic growth projections when they want to proclaim Social Security's weakness, then in the same breath claim that privatized accounts will give unbelievably-high "Forever Bull" rates of returns, rates that are possible only if the nation's economy grows for the next 75 years at the same pace it did at the height of Bill Clinton's boom times. 2) He doesn't mention that the Republicans have always wanted to destroy Social Security, and have been willing and eager to lie in order to do so. Bush himself, back in 1978, claimed that Social Security would "go bust" by 1988. It obviously didn't. But the Strib is being hammered by right-wingers, including the very wealthy William Cooper, head of TCF Bank, prominent Republican, and very protective boss of one of the PowerLine bloggers. So they -- or at least Eric Black -- apparently feel they must try to pretend that privatization is a "he said, she said" issue when it really isn't. And the Strib is one of the nation's better newspapers. You know what to do: eblack@startribune.com (Eric Black) andersg@startribune.com (Anders Gyllenhaal, the Strib's chief editor) opinion@startribune.com (the letters e-mail)
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