Tag: Social Security
Why the Twitter Files actually matter
“One clue is in a message by Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, who alludes to “the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016.” In 2016, there was an effort by the Russian government to interfere with the general election in a way that would hurt Hillary Clinton and Democrats’ prospects. As later documented in the Mueller report, this effort involved both a “troll farm” of Russian accounts masquerading as Americans to spread false or inflammatory information, and the “hack-and-leak” campaign in which leading Democrats’ emails were stolen and provided to WikiLeaks.
After Trump won, many leading figures in politics, tech, media, and law enforcement concluded that major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook should have done more to stop this Russian interference effort and the spread of “misinformation” more generally (with some arguing that this was a problem regardless of electoral impact, and others claiming that this helped or even caused Trump’s victory). Law enforcement officials argued the Russian campaign was illegal and indicted about two dozen Russians believed to be involved in it. Social media companies began to take a more aggressive approach to curbing what they saw as misinformation, and as the 2020 election approached, they met regularly with FBI and other government officials to discuss the dangers of potential new foreign interference campaigns.
But several issues are being conflated here. Misinformation is (in theory) false information. Foreign propaganda is not necessarily false, but it is being spread by a foreign government with malicious intent (for example, to inflame America’s divisions). Hacked material, though, is tricker in part because it often isn’t misinformation — its power comes from its accuracy. Now, it is theoretically possible that false information could be mixed in with true information as part of a hacked document dump, so it’s important to authenticate it to the extent possible. And even authentic information can often be ripped out of context to appear more damning than it really is. Still, Twitter was putting itself in the awkward position where it would be resolving to suppress information that could well be accurate, for the greater good of preventing foreign interference in an election.
More broadly, a blanket ban on hacked material doesn’t seem particularly well thought through, since a fair amount of journalism is based on material that is illicitly obtained in some way (such as the Pentagon Papers). Every major media source wrote about the DNC and Podesta email leaks, as well as the leaked State Department cables, while entertainment journalists wrote about the Sony hack. Should all those stories be banned like the Post’s was? A standard that Twitter won’t host any sexual images of someone posted without their consent, or any personal information like someone’s address, is a neutral one. Beyond that, determining what stolen or hacked information is newsworthy is inherently subjective. Should that judgment be left to social media companies?
Then there’s the problem that Twitter jumped to the conclusion that this was a hack in the first place. I can see why they did — recent high-profile examples of mass personal info dumps like this were generally hacks. So if you had been anticipating a chance to “do over” 2016’s hack scandal, here it seemed to be. But it was jumping to a conclusion. Additionally, the apparent belief of some employees that proactively censoring the story until there was more information about whether it was hacked info was a way to express “caution” seems dubious — fully banning a link to a media outlet from the platform was a sweeping measure.
So to me this seems a pretty clear case of overreach by Twitter. This wasn’t a “rigging” of the election (again, the ban was only in place for a little over a day). But the decision — born out of a blinkered focus on avoiding a repeat of 2016, rather than taking speech or press freedom or the different details of this situation into account — was the wrong call, in my view. ”
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“it should be noted that the phenomenon of controversial Twitter bannings occurring at top executives’ whims has not been solved under the Musk regime. Musk has already decided to suspend Kanye West’s account, keep a preexisting ban on Infowars host Alex Jones in place, and ban an account tracking flight information for Musk’s private jet (even though he said..his “commitment to free speech” was so strong he would allow that account to keep posting).”
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“When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, Twitter again grappled with the topic of “misinformation.” As with Trump (and with hate speech), Twitter executives likely believed lives could well hinge on their decisions. So by May 2020, the company announced it would remove or label tweets that “directly pose a risk to someone’s health or well-being,” such as encouragements that people disregard social distancing guidelines.
But the company essentially defined “misinformation” as whatever went against the public health establishment’s current conventional wisdom. And as time passed, Covid quickly became another issue where conservatives and some journalists came to deeply distrust that establishment, viewing it as making mistakes and giving politically slanted guidance.
The situation took another turn when President Biden took office. By the summer of 2021, his administration was trying to encourage widespread vaccine adoption in the hope the pandemic could be ended entirely. (The omicron variant, which sufficiently evaded vaccines to end that hope, was not yet circulating.) Toward that end, administration officials publicly demanded social companies do more to fight misinformation, and poured private pressure on the companies to delete certain specific accounts.
One of those accounts belonged to commentator Alex Berenson, who “has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them,” according to the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. After Berenson was eventually banned, he sued and obtained records showing the White House had specifically asked Twitter why he hadn’t been kicked off the platform yet. Another lawsuit against the administration, from Republican state attorneys general and other people who believed their speech was suppressed (including Bhattacharya), is also pending.
All that is to say that there is a thorny question here about whether the government should be trying to get individual people who have violated no laws banned from social media. And from the standpoint of 2022, when the US has adopted a return-to-normal policy without universal vaccination or the virus being suppressed, and when there’s increased attention on whether school lockdowns harmed children, some reflection may be called for about what constitutes misinformation and what constitutes opinions people may have about policy in a free society.”
Republicans Need an Actual Plan To Grow the Economy
“under the current policy, the Social Security trust fund runs dry by 2034 and benefits will be automatically cut by at least 25 percent, leaving little room to shelter the most vulnerable seniors who truly depend on it for most of their retirement income. This inevitable scenario will happen even sooner now that inflation has jacked up benefits. In practice, by doing nothing, Democrats too want to cut benefits.
Yet you didn’t hear the Republicans make that point during the campaign. Nor did they make the case for reforming the program before its impending insolvency. They were completely silent on the need to reduce government debt policies. I understand that these are unpleasant topics of conversation—it is the proverbial “root canal” of policy, as the late Jack Kemp liked to say. But ignoring these realities will not change them.”
Inflation strikes twice for many retirees
“Spiking inflation is helping push up taxes on a group that lawmakers are loath to cross: the elderly.
While Social Security benefits increase along with rising prices, and seniors just received a fat cost-of-living adjustment, the threshold at which they can begin to owe taxes on that money is not adjusted for inflation — and hasn’t been changed since the Reagan administration.”
Social Security Is Running Toward Insolvency
The Democratic plan to smash poverty for seniors and people with disabilities
“In 2021, the maximum SSI benefit for an individual is $9,530.12 per year. The poverty line for a single person is $12,880 — meaning that SSI, at most, brings recipients up to less than three-quarters of the poverty line.
It gets worse, though. Let’s say you’re an SSI recipient married to another recipient, which makes you an “eligible couple.” You could both be retirees in your 70s, or disabled/blind people earlier in life.
You don’t get to add your benefit amounts together. Instead, you have to share a maximum benefit of $14,293.61, only 50 percent more than the individual benefit. The effect is a really dramatic marriage penalty: Two SSI recipients receive a large income boost if they get divorced, but those who marry take a big cut in benefits.
In late May 2020, Joe Biden announced his campaign’s disability policy platform, which included major expansions of SSI benefits. The plan set the maximum benefit at 100 percent of the poverty line, a 35 percent increase in benefits over the status quo. The proposal would also eliminate both the marriage penalty — letting couples keep their full benefits — and the complex “in-kind assistance” provisions that result in reduced SSI checks for some people who, say, live for free in a family member’s home.
There’s more. SSI is currently limited to people with assets of less than $2,000, or $3,000 for couples. That means many seniors who have even a small amount of retirement savings, as well as disabled people with nest eggs, aren’t eligible.
Biden would more than double the asset limit for individuals and nearly triple it for couples. I’d personally prefer getting rid of the asset test altogether, as it can encourage people to spend every bit of savings they have to qualify for the benefit; that said, raising it is an improvement.
Biden has recently faced a strong push from his allies in Congress to include these changes in the huge $6 trillion spending package Democrats plan to pass later this summer or in the fall.”
America’s Middle Class Gets More Welfare Than the Poor
“programs for the poor are only a tiny portion of the U.S. welfare state. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that more than 60 percent of American households receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. To get an idea of just how big the American welfare state has become, consider that those transfer payments from the federal government are equal to 34 percent of all wages and taxes in the U.S.”
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“The largest transfer programs are the middle-class entitlements, Social Security and Medicare. In addition, a large portion of the third biggest entitlement program, Medicaid, actually goes to the middle-class elderly and disabled individuals, not the poor. Those three programs alone now make up more than half of all federal spending.”
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“we need to understand that, in practice, when an individual pays Social Security taxes, none of those taxes are set aside for that individual’s benefits. Rather, they are used to pay benefits to those who are currently retired. Social Security is merely a transfer payment from workers to retirees. In that sense, it operates exactly the same as any other transfer or welfare program.”
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“Many individuals will receive more than taxes paid plus a reasonable amount of interest on those taxes.”
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“according to the Social Security system’s trustees, the program faces a future shortfall of more than $43 trillion7 (measured in discounted present value over an infinite horizon—that is, if the government put away $43 trillion today and earned 3 percent interest on those funds, it would have enough money so that, combined with payroll taxes, it could pay all future benefits). Unfortunately, however, the federal government doesn’t have an extra $43 trillion. As a result, there is simply no way that Social Security can pay future benefits without a massive tax increase.”