Media Matters and Bob Somerby note that George Will made a screaming error in this passage from his Washington Post column on Sunday:
Today the government is partially funded by that surplus of Social Security tax revenue over outlays, a fact disguised by politicians talking rot about Social Security being an “insurance” program with a “trust fund” in a “lock box.” But between 2011 and 2016, Social Security outlays will exceed revenue by $32 billion, and the sums will rapidly increase during the cascading retirements of baby boomers.
As the critics point out, this is obviously untrue — the statistic we endlessly hear repeated is that Social Security is projected to move into deficit from 2018, not in 2011. Somerby does an excellent job of tracing the mistake back to a Roll Call column by New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg in which he talked about the decline of the Social Security surplus between 2011 and 2016. Gregg wrote, “At that point [after 2011], the surplus begins to diminish for the first time, falling to $113 billion in 2012, $106 billion in 2013 and so on down to $85 billion in 2015 and accelerating downward every year thereafter.” He later adds, “In the five-year period from 2011 to 2016, the contracting Social Security surplus will gouge $32 billion out of the rest of the budget and with each coming year remove an accelerating amount as the Social Security surplus continues to shrink.” Will appears to have misunderstood Gregg’s argument entirely.
Over at Tapped, Sam Rosenfeld catches a mistake in Jonathan Weisman’s Washington Post article today, which states that the so-called PAYGO rules in Congress “[require] that future tax cuts be paid for by equal proportions of spending cuts and revenue increases.” The rules (which should be reinstated) actually only require that new spending or tax cuts be paid for by through spending cuts and/or revenue increases; they do not require that the proportions be equal. (See also my post on an as-yet-uncorrected error in a Weisman/Jim VandeHei story on Social Security.)