Today Atrios rightly notes the column in this morning’s WSJ by Social Security Trustee Thomas Saving. As he points out, the deceptive budgetary calculations and arguments Saving advances are about on the caliber you might expect from a third-rate talk radio yakker. But Atrios’s main point is that the Journal, in identifying Saving, somehow left off the part that this Saving is a Trustee. (He does note it in the column itself.)
But there’s more.
This morning Saving is a lead panelist at the House Ways and Means Committee’s first hearing on Social Security. There of course he’s identified as a Trustee.
What they don’t say — and I’ll be very curious to hear whether it comes up in the testimony — is that Saving recently signed on to be the Social Security spokesman for Progress for America, one of the two main money-fronts the White House has pushing privatization.
Late Update: TPM Reader JN points out this highly relevant passage in the Trustees 2004 report: “As Public Trustees we strive to work in a nonpartisan way to ensure the integrity of the process by which these reports are prepared and the credibility of the information they contain.”
