The RNC brings in the legal eagles to defend the Social Security Speech Code.
As you’ll see in this article from the South Bend Tribune, the RNC is sending threatening letters to local television stations requesting they stop running anti-Social Security phase-out ads from Moveon.org.
The ad, as it turns out, is demonstrably accurate.
According to the Tribune, the RNC letter reads:
“The advertisement in question falsely and maliciously makes reference to ‘George Bush’s planned Social Security benefit cuts of up to 46 percent to pay for private accounts …’ ”
In his State of the Union address, the president said that “Social Security will not change in any way” for Americans 55 and older.”
The RNC letter said that “what MoveOn.org calls ‘Bush’s planned Social Security benefit cuts’ is actually a plan that would hold starting Social Security benefits steady in purchasing power, rather than allowing them to nearly double over the next 75 years as they are projected to do under the current benefit formula.”
(Note that the phrase “falsely and maliciously” has a <$Ad$> clear legal import in this case and sends a clear message.)
The reference to benefit cuts of up to 46 percent is a reference to the president’s widely-reported intention of shifting from wage-indexing to inflation-indexing for future benefits. This is true.
Indeed, their response concedes the truth of Moveon’s ad, as long as you know how to decode their rhetorical flimflam.
As you see, they seek to refute Moveon’s claim by noting the president’s claim that people over 55 will not be affected. Setting aside the highly-debatable point about whether even that is true, the RNC no doubt realizes that there are people under 55 — in fact, quite a few of them.
The next ‘refutation’ is even more clear. They say that the president’s plan “is actually a plan that would hold starting Social Security benefits steady in purchasing power, rather than allowing them to nearly double over the next 75 years as they are projected to do under the current benefit formula.”
I mean, how friggin’ obvious does this have to be?
Once again this is a reference to inflation rather than wage indexing of benefits. The RNC’s argument seems to amount to the proposition that benefit cuts for which they believe there is an argument are simply not cuts.
All those fencing-sitting Republicans say that we need to have a full debate about Social Security. So why is the RNC trying to use the courts to muzzle any honest discussion of the president’s plan?
Late Update: The secret RNC-FactCheck.org axis? Or is someone just an easy mark? We’ve been sitting for a while on a post about the atrociously bad fact-checking on Social Security being done by FactCheck.org, especially one they did on the Moveon ad. Notwithstanding the fact that the RNC says that President Bush has a “plan that would hold starting Social Security benefits steady in purchasing power, rather than allowing them to nearly double over the next 75 years as they are projected to do under the current benefit formula,” I think we’ve argued pretty persuasively above that this point is bogus. The RNC can use this tortured verbiage if they like. But they can hardly claim that Moveon is lying when they call this a cut since the Social Security Administration itself calls it a cut. And look at how Factcheck.org described the president’s plan back on the 1st of the month. They called it a “plan that would hold starting Social Security benefits steady in purchasing power, rather than allowing them to nearly double over the next 75 years as they are projected to do under the current benefit formula.” Who’s cribbing who here?
