Monday, October 21, 2013

Right Wing Journal

The Albuquerque Journal's glorious story about UNM students being chosen to compete in a national debate about the nation's debt is very suspect.  These kinds of things are being funded by billionaire business people as a way to turn young folks against social security.  Read this in the Huffington Post.

Maybe someone should be vetting this participation at my alma mater, the Anderson School of Business at UNM.  Will there be adequate airing of all sides in such a debate?  Will participants from the moderate and left student organizations be included on the debate teams to argue for social safety nets?  Did the business school look at the implications of this effort closely?  You know that whole due diligence thing that business people like to exercise?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw the story in the Journal about this. The reporter, Mike Bush, says we have a "skyrocketing national debt."

He wasn't quoting someone. He was stating it as a fact, which it's not. The debt is coming down, as the article you link to points out.

You hear tea baggers like Michelle Bachman repeat this lie all the time. Reporters sit there and say nothing. Some of them repeat it, too.

What you don't hear is Democratic politicians refuting it.

So why?

What you hear is, President Obama making ominous utterances about Social Security and Medicare, or about our "long term debt," which means the same thing, in order to grease the skids for cutting these programs. In order to scare us into accepting the cuts he has long sought to make to these programs.

I've blogged about this many times. People don't seem to believe Democrats want to cut these programs, but they do.

Anonymous said...

Comrade Baca,
So the UNM students shouldn't be allowed to participate in a debate on the issue, because they might become educated and make a decision for themselves? That they might come to realize that social security is nothing more than a gevernment run Ponzi scheme?

As for bubba gump's comment on the debt, a 70% increase in the debt in the course of the obama administration is not "sky rocketing"??? Wow! I bet he would describe the certainty of a similar or likely larger increase in his health care premiums as sky-rocketing.

Anonymous said...

I remember back in English Composition class when they told us how to calculate the number of question marks you should use at the end of a sentence.

We were taught, too, some of us, the importance of knowing what you're talking about before you start talking.

Anonymous, you obviously didn't read the articles Comrade Baca linked to that show the debate program to be nothing more than a propaganda tool

Nor are you aware that the first thing President Obama did was to put George W Bush's two off-budget wars into the budget. You haven't been told, either, that even with that, the deficit is shrinking rapidly.

Fox New and Rush Limbaugh haven't told you about the Social Security Administration's latest report on the system's financial condition, in which it says it has enough money in the trust fund right now to pay every single benefit through 2033.

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/TR/2013/index.html

Do you have statistics that show that it's a ponzi scheme? Have you ever seen any? Did you just learn a new phrase and want to use it???

A slight adjustment in the payroll cap would fund the program until every baby boomer is dead. As it is now, you only pay the Social Security tax on the first $110,000 or so in wages.

We've always had people like you who just don't like the idea of helping out their fellow man. Statistics about the millions of seniors who used to live their last years in poverty, malnourished, wasting away, suffering from whatever disease and infirmity that comes with being poor, never bothered them because they just skipped over those and looked for excuses to not take care of anybody but themselves.