OT RIGHT WING SOCIAL SECURITY LIES -- John Fund (Wall Street Journal) distorted the facts to defend his, Hume's distortions of FDR

The Conservative Media Machine Lies Again

Fund lied to cover up his and Brit Hume's lies. Why does this ass hole
still have a job at the Wall Street Journal?


<CITE:http://mediamatters.org/items/200503140006>


Fund distorted the facts to defend his, Hume's distortions of FDR

Declaring that his "overheated liberal critics" should "calm down, as
we look at the facts," Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund
distorted the facts to defend his allegation -- first made by Fox News
Washington managing editor Brit Hume -- that former President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt supported "supplant[ing]" government funding of Social
Security with private accounts.

In his March 14 "On the Trail" column on The Wall Street Journal's
OpinionJournal.com, Fund (1) erroneously asserted that "at no point did
Mr. Hume or I claim that FDR would have endorsed Mr. Bush's private
accounts," and (2) falsely maintained that Roosevelt supported some
form of "private plans," even though he belatedly conceded that
Roosevelt did not envision that they would supplant the basic Social
Security system.

In fact, both Fund and Hume explicitly tied their distortions of
Roosevelt to Bush's plan for private accounts, and Roosevelt's plan for
voluntary contributory annuities was fundamentally different from any
form of private investment plan in that Roosevelt's annuities would
have gone through the Social Security trust fund and provided
guaranteed benefits.

Although he conceded that he had "confuse[d] the terminology of the day
by thinking Roosevelt's call for supplanting old-age pensions referred
to Social Security," Fund downplayed his distortion of Roosevelt while
simultaneously providing false cover for himself and Hume:

Former Social Security commissioner Robert Ball properly notes that
I did confuse the terminology of the day by thinking Roosevelt's call
for supplanting old-age pensions referred to Social Security. Instead,
he was referring to the need to replace an early welfare program for
the elderly with Social Security.

But at no point did Mr. Hume or I claim that FDR would have
endorsed Mr. Bush's private accounts. We were correct in noting that
FDR had proposed a voluntary program to allow people to buy annuities.

But both Hume and Fund strongly suggested that Roosevelt would support
Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security. As Media Matters
for America has previously documented when Fund distorted Roosevelt's
words in the February 4 edition of the OpinionJournal.com's "Political
Diary," he asserted that Roosevelt's "call for the establishment of
Social Security directly anticipated today's reform agenda."

Similarly, on the February 3 edition of Fox News' Special Report with
Brit Hume, Hume suggested that Senate Democrats were being hypocritical
by invoking Roosevelt to oppose Bush's plan for private accounts:

HUME: Senate Democrats gathered at the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial
today to invoke the image of FDR in calling on President Bush to remove
private accounts from his Social Security proposal. But it turns out
that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the
Social Security program when he proposed it.

Even after recognizing that Roosevelt's plan for voluntary contributory
annuities would not divert money from Social Security payroll taxes,
Fund's March 14 column continued to mislead readers about Roosevelt's
attitude toward private accounts by asserting that Roosevelt recognized
the importance of some form of "private plans" supplementing the basic
Social Security system.

As Media Matters has noted, Roosevelt's concept of "voluntary
contributory annuities" did not resemble "private plans." Although that
component of Roosevelt's plan did not pass through Congress, the plan
would have placed income generated from the government's sale of
voluntary "annuity certificates" to workers "into the trust fund along
with the payroll taxes collected under the mandatory [Social Security]
program," and "would guarantee the purchasers a definite amount of
income" or guaranteed benefit level, as Edwin Witte, executive director
of the Committee on Economic Security, noted during 1935 congressional
hearings on Roosevelt's Social Security bill.

As Media Matters documented, Hume's original distortion of Roosevelt
prompted Air America radio host Al Franken and Roosevelt's grandson and
former Social Security associate commissioner James Roosevelt Jr. to
call on Hume to resign.

In an article in the March 2005 edition of The American Prospect,
former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich -- who witnessed the
Roosevelt distortion firsthand on the February 4 edition of Fox News'
The Big Story with John Gibson -- described it as illustrative of the
difficulties in trying to get the "Republican propaganda machine" to be
held accountable:

This is just one example of how the Republican propaganda machine
is lying to the American people about Bush's plan for Social Security,
just as it has lied about so much else. FOX News' many distortions are
mirrored on other yell-television cable networks, on right-wing radio,
and on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. It's a
formidable machine.