Today’s long, anecdotal article on Social Security in the New York Times includes a passage reinforcing the canard that the program is a bad deal for blacks:

Here as elsewhere, Social Security has paid back some more generously than others. Created to protect the most vulnerable, it redistributes money from rich people to poor people, and from men to women, who often have no pension or assets.

But as family structures have evolved from the one-earner nuclear model of the 1930’s, the program has not always kept up. It rewards married couples more than single people, and couples with one stay-at-home spouse more than those in which both spouses worked.

Groups with shorter life expectancies, like African-Americans, receive fewer benefits than those who live longer.

This may be technically true, but it’s highly misleading. Here’s what the AP’s Matt Crenson found in a story I praised back in January:

Does Social Security cheat black Americans?

Yes, President Bush insisted last week as he pushed his proposal to revamp Social Security. But some Social Security experts say the answer is clearly “no.”

The way Bush explained it to a group of black supporters last week, blacks are shortchanged because they are more likely than whites to die before receiving their fair share of retirement benefits.

It is true that blacks, on average, have shorter lifespans than whites. But that is not the only factor that needs to be considered, say economists who study the government’s retirement program.

Social Security pays lower-income workers more, relative to what they pay into the program, than higher-income workers. Blacks are paid less than whites on average, so the distribution of benefits favors them. That evens out the discrepancy caused by the difference in death rates, said economist Jeffrey Liebman, a former Clinton administration official whose research is often cited by the Bush administration in support of its own policies.

But there are other features of Social Security that tip the balance further toward blacks. Spouses and dependents of Social Security beneficiaries who die continue receiving half of the deceased person’s benefits. Furthermore, the program pays not just retirement benefits but disability benefits to those too sick or injured to work. Blacks, 13 percent of the population, comprise 17 percent of the disability beneficiaries.

On balance, the program may actually benefit blacks more than whites, according to analyses by AARP, scholars such as Liebman and the Social Security Administration’s actuaries. Only the conservative Heritage Foundation has concluded otherwise.

Would it have killed Leland and Wilgoren to do some actual policy research?

Update 6/21: Media Matters has also published an article on this. (But you read it here first!)