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The Social Security debate continues to be infuriating. Pardon me while I release some smoke from the top of my pate.
There are a number of strange arguments floating around out there as part of the desperate effort to try to get the American people to buy President Bush's Social Security pig-in-a-fiscal-poke. Something happens when you put these arguments side by side: They undermine one another.
Consider, if you will, this comment from someone named Craig on my most recent Social Security post. As far as I can tell, Craig has cut-and-pasted big chunks of long quotes from two different Washington Times columns into his comment, one by Thomas Sowell and another by John Palffy. (I'll write off the failure to attribute these quotes to oversight since the commenter does say "Please read the following info.")
Sowell argues that the Social Security Trust Fund is a mere "legal and accounting fiction" because one arm of the government is putting its excess cash into the hands of another, in the form of the IOUs known as Treasury bonds. As I and others keep noting, the idea that Treasury bonds are mere fictions is one that would be news to the vast number of institutions and individuals around the world who consider them the bluest of blue chip investments. What this argument really says is that the government doesn't have to make good on those bonds -- they're just a "fiction" -- when they're purchased with our Social Security taxes, set aside to handle the future shortfalls of the system, and held in trust for the retirements of America's working people. The U.S. government would never default on the bonds purchased by another country's central bank -- but hey, if the American people put their retirement money in such a form, the government is sure to renege on the debt. We're so sure it's going to renege that we're getting ready to ditch the most successful and beloved U.S. government program in history.
Why will the government default? Apparently, we're to believe, because it can. "Liberals are desperate to keep Social Security as it is, because that would mean they can continue spending your money as they see fit," Sowell writes. Funny, though; the money was fine until Bush's conservatives started cutting taxes four years ago. "Our money" was frittered away not by "liberals" but by the current administration -- on dividend tax cuts, estate tax cuts, wars of choice and other elective policies. Those policies could be reversed as easily, maybe more easily, than privatizing Social Security.
But this all gets more interesting in the second half of Craig's post, where he moves from Sowell's argument to Palffy's. Palffy wants us to put aside the silly notion that privatization means our retirement funds will be at risk. How foolish to imagine that there is any reason to worry about placing Social Security money in private markets rather than in the government's hands! But since the pesky AARP is stirring up those excitable seniors again, Palffy has a plan to soothe our graying hairs: Why, we can require that all those private (excuse me, "personal") accounts invest their money in one safe place. That ultra-reliable investment? Inflation-protected Treasury bonds!
So much for the idea that private accounts restore free-market choice. Under this plan, Social Security pretty much remains exactly the same, except that there are little chunks of money in Treasury bonds that have our names on them instead of one big chunk of bonds with Social Security's name on it. The government is still holding all that money for us, and if we're to believe Sowell and his ilk, the government can't resist getting its greedy Big Government paws on any money in sight, so there's just as much reason under the new plan as under the existing one to expect the perfidious liberals in Congress (despite their minority status!) to default on its obligations.
This round-trip doesn't get us very far at all, does it? The spinning is desperate, contradictory, ultimately inane. That's what happens when your stated plans of "reform" don't match your actual goal (eliminating Social Security). Or maybe the Washington Times' columnists, and their advocates among the population of blog commenters, need new marching orders from the White House: They did such a good job on the "private/personal" switcheroo.
In the end, there's one thing I can agree with the conservatives on: Social Security is only as safe as the lawmakers in Washington allow it to be. Sowell & co. say we must fear because we can't trust the government to keep Social Security afloat. But the government he is telling us will betray Social Security isn't in the hands of the "liberals" upon whom his finger points. It is the Bush administration that has endangered Social Security, and it is the Bush administration that now wishes to end Social Security as we know it. It may get its way. But let's make sure the American people understand who's responsible for the ensuing debacle.
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I want to return to the idea I floated a few days ago about bug-tracking software for newsrooms. The comments response ranged from "neat idea!" to "it'll never work," so let's look it over again.
What I imagined was something similar to the way open-source software development projects manage bug reports. When people file bugs against such a project, they go to a publicly available online resource and enter a form that says "Here's a problem I encountered," and provide details. Different projects follow different organizational structures, but generally speaking, other developers will review the bug and try to classify it: Sometimes they'll say it's a duplicate and point to previous entries in the database that dealt with it; sometimes they'll say it's a simple problem and go fix it right away and close it out; sometimes they'll say it's a big one and leave it open to be dealt with in the future; sometimes they'll say it's a "known bug" that for one reason or another is never going to be fixed; sometimes they'll say it's not a bug at all.
For a newsroom, the idea is to provide a structure and a channel for reader dissatisfaction. You wouldn't have to follow the software model detail for detail, but the general outline could be valuable: Provide a form for readers to enter complaints, one that requires them to present details. Post the complaint publicly as soon as it's entered, and record the publication's response in a reasonably prompt fashion -- anything from "Thanks, we fixed the spelling on that name" to "we chose the phrase 'private accounts' because it is an accurate description of the president's proposal, and the label was in wide use by supporters of the idea until very recently, so we do not plan to stop using the term." The explanation is on record, and if other readers keep filing the same complaint they can simply be pointed back to the original answer. Spam? Just delete it. Letters to the editor that don't have a specific complaint? Re-route them to the letters box.
The most common objection seems to be, forget it -- this will become another free-for-all for political partisans to work out their agendas, another wide-open Internet forum that will degenerate into circular debate. Such forums already exist, to be sure; the point of a bug tracker is to avoid that outcome by choosing a narrower environment for the feedback that allows you to quickly aggregate and dispose of duplicate complaints, and that provides a public record of responsiveness and accountability. If 500 people all holler that you shouldn't say "private accounts," you can answer them once and be done with it -- but you can point each individual complaint back to your explanation, so those people understand that you actually heard them and offered some sort of response. There's a big difference between the silence of no response and "no, we're not doing that, here's why." The latter won't satisfy everyone, but it at least acknowledges that there's been an exchange on the subject.
Ross Karchner proposed a somewhat different model based on wiki practices: "1) A publically viewable changelog, where you can see, in detail, the changes made to an article. 2) A place where the author(s) and editor(s) can discuss the changes needed and made. This is also in public view..." I'm not sure whether Ross means the changelog and the writer/editor dialogue to commence from the first time the writer composed a draft, or only upon publication. The former is, I think, too wide open -- even a blogger has the right to compose a posting and revise it in private before choosing to push the "publish" button. The latter is fine -- but since most reputable publications rarely change articles once they're published, and note the changes as corrections if they do, then it's just codifying an existing practice in slightly different ways.
As for the idea of trying all this out at Salon: Who knows, I might well advocate it, though my current on-leave status doesn't put me in a good spot to work on it. But Salon has been dealing with the back-and-forth of online criticism of our work for 9 years plus. Whatever problems we may suffer from, a failure of responsiveness to online feedback is not, I think, one of them, and we have a pretty sturdy process for reviewing complaints fast and correcting them where needed.
I think this approach would pay off best for a newsroom that is having difficulty convincing readers that the publication is actually listening to them. If you showed the public that you were recording and responding to the issues they raised -- whether you end up publishing a correction or simply saying, "We don't think that needs correcting, and here's why" -- I think you'd start to bank some confidence and trust pretty quickly.
I'm not suggesting that this idea is the single, one-fix-solves-all-problems answer to the ills of journalism today. It's a pragmatic, you-could-do-it-real-soon suggestion for beginning to deal with professional journalism's biggest problem: the public's loss of trust, which begins with the sense that media companies are big institutions that pay no attention to their own mistakes.
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