(H/T – Tom Blumer)
Last week, Peter Ferrera wondered in an Investor’s Business Daily op-ed where the already-late Social Security/Medicare Trustees’ Report is. As of a few minutes ago, it’s still not available.
Ferrera hits a multitude of topics, one of which I’ll focus on here:
The administration is trying to delay the report until mid-August, when it’s hoping the country will be on vacation and won’t notice. Or maybe the delay is because the White House is trying to bludgeon the chief actuaries for Medicare and Social Security into fudging the numbers.
Those chief actuaries are dedicated, career professionals who have worked their way up the bureaucracy over decades.
During the Reagan administration, the congressional Democrat majorities and the New York Times made clear to us that tampering with the work of the government’s career professionals, let alone the career number crunchers, would be grounds for impeachment.
I’m not certain the rule of law applies to this administration, where the Justice Department cites “payback time” as its reason for not prosecuting Black Panther Voting Rights Act violations.
Point of order – while the report is done by the career actuaries, they’re signed by the political masters, five of whom are hand-picked by Obama (the Secretaries of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services, and two Public Trustees, whose positions were vacant as of last year). I’m not taking bets on which scenario is actually happening because an objective view of either program, especially Social Security, would show that things are a lot worse than they thought just last year.
