Myth Information

...Dear federal diary Can you fool all of the press all of the time...

...Meanwhile, households with incomes less than $10,000 lost 7 percent of their federal benefits...

...Federal employees make 30 percent less than they would at comparable jobs in the private sector...

...Why aren't costs controlled, anyway...

...Imagine a senior citizen watching the news: A Medicare cut...

...Note, though, what is allowed now: essentially passive activity—the giving of money, the display of a sign, and obvious free speech guarantees...

...While the Gannett reporter does note that Senator William Roth, a Republican, opposes the repeal on the ground that it "will lead to a politicization of federal employees," that objection is quickly passed over...

...Overall, press gullibility is not inevitable...

...But it's way off the mark...

...The press, when it's bothered to pay attention, has blithely ignored that and lazily overlooked the real effects on the bureaucracy...

...As it happened, the Senate decided $10 billion would be enough...

...Richard Harwood has called journalism "the last refuge of the vaguely talented," and as a member of that vaguely talented craft myself, I know that bone-headed things get through from time to time...

...Social Security, Medicare, and federal pension benefits to households making over $200,000 fully doubled from 1980 to 1991...

...The people who are going to be paying taxes on a higher rate of Social Security benefits don't make very good copy: They're silver-haired Rotarians and cruise ship aficionados...

...The upshot is that while June and Ward Cleaver are doing well in retirement, the truly needy are out of luck...

...They watch the news or scan newspapers...

...On the weekend after the House voted on Clinton's budget, The Washington Post weighed in with a front-page Sunday story: "Capital's Caps May Be Heartland's Cuts...

...And don't forget the 13 available days of sick leave, the 10 federal holidays, and the comp time...

...If a civil servant wants to be political, then he ought to be political and tie his job fortunes to the party in power...

...The remark kicked off a week of ominous news reports...

...The alternative is hard work from the outside...

...For example, the Federal Page in the Post is much improved over its past incarnations, and Mike Causey's "Federal Diary," read with a knowing eye, is generally on the mark about the civil service...

...Old gold According to Congressional Budget Office data analyzed by Phillip Longman and Neil Howe for The Atlantic in 1992, a quarter of all entitlements—$200 billion—went to households with incomes over $50,000 in 1991...

...And on the April 26 edition of ABC's "World News Tonight," correspondent John Martin used the statistic in an otherwise tough report on federal pensioners: "Federal workers say they deserve the [retirement] COLA [cost of living adjustment] because government salaries are 20 to 30 percent below private industry...

...The paper clarified that three days later...

...But a repeal of the act, instead of moving toward that sensible solution, would make things even worse than they are now...

...Meanwhile, the average private sector worker makes $26,758, and only 10 percent make salaries in the government's top range...

...The holiday time alone is lavish and can be cleverly cloaked...

...Leaving, say, about half the work force as nonpolitical employees would ensure enough continuity between one administration and another...

...To set those salaries, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) conducts a national survey in which private sector personnel managers read federal job descriptions and say what a comparable job with them would pay...

...Until after the Senate vote, no major story that dealt with Medicare and the budget explained that, or the fact that Moynihan had (unwisely) ruled out raising premiums on the well-off...

...The results of these surveys yield the 29 percent average gap...

...Thirty-seven percent of America's retirees manage to slip from their cold-water flats and tuna fish diets to go on overseas vacations every year, while 40 percent are too poor to owe any income tax...

...Today, more than 60 percent of all federal benefit spending flows to the 12 percent of Americans who are 65 or older...

...Add other income, plus half your Social Security benefits...

...And that makes even modest changes more difficult than they need to be...

...and only a handful of editorials, such as The Atlanta Constitution's "Hatch Act Changes Mean Return of the Spoils System," has raised the alarm over introducing overt partisanship into the civil service...

...But there are a hundred other questions involved: Do the rich pay enough...

...Entitlement spending is complicated, but this is an issue where the media's learning curve has been enormous...

...Down the Hatch Of course, political patronage is not a bad thing...

...Datelined from Streator, Illinois, a "quintessentially Heartland America community of 15,000," the piece plays on readers' emotions by highlighting the plight of two 80-year-old widows...

...On March 11, after a House Post Office and Civil Service subcommittee hearing, The Washington Post reported, "Rep...

...The savings would come from reducing how much the government pays doctors and hospitals for Medicare patients—nothing would actually be taken away from the feeble old people on television...

...That's because providers routinely shift costs not covered by Medicare to privately insured patients...

...How many private engineers are performing at such levels or higher...

...From the Washington anchor desk, Lou Waters set the scene: "President Clinton's economic plan would hit many older Americans who receive Social Security benefits with their own special tax," he said...

...This factoid is like the October Surprise: enduring yet wrong...

...Later in the week, CNN used footage of a patient on his way to surgery to illustrate this point: "To make up the shortfall in the energy tax, the President may be forced to go ahead with proposals to increase spending cuts by another $50 billion, some $35 billion of which would come from Medicare...

...Government employees are unfairly limited in their political rights by the Hatch Act...

...That means bureaucrats are being paid for work it only sounds as if they're doing...

...Consider these excerpts from the description of a GS-12 (a basically low level) engineer: " . . . requires the use of advanced techniques and the modification and extension of theories, precepts, and practices of the field and related sciences and disciplines . . . carries out complex or novel assignments requiring the development of new or improvised techniques and procedures . . . work is expected to result in the development of new or refined equipment, materials, processes, products, and/or scientific methods...

...William Safire is one example of a journalist who spent time in government and who has lived to tell about it with great wisdom...

...According to the Hay Group, a compensation consulting firm, federal employees making from $20,000 up to $125,000 receive total benefits ranging in value from $12,000 at the bottom end to $55,000 at the top, besting corporate America by about $2,500 at each step...

...The day after Clinton's economic package passed the House in May, CNN's "Early Prime" news show went to Florida, the Arcadia of American retirees, to assess how senior citizens felt about changes in Social Security taxation...

...Is slowing Medicare down good policy...

...Problems of sophistication don't come up when somebody who understands bureaucratic culture from firsthand experience is writing about it...

...To do pieces like that requires a level of sophistication about government that many reporters simply don't have...

...But the Safires of the world are few and far between...

...Instead of accepting that reporters are congenitally given to boneheadedness, though, why not think of a way to break out of it and turn the cons around on lobbyists and bureaucrats...

...In this context, the case for tying benefits and benefit taxation to income levels is clear...

...To put something across clearly and simply and correctly, you've first got to understand it yourself—and understand it well...

...The federal government, with its $107 billion payroll, is the nation's largest single employer...

...Ten years ago, respectable opinion held that Social Security was rightly beyond the political pale...

...Where does it come from...

...Congress is about to send Clinton a bill, which he says he supports, to weaken the Hatch Act...

...Yet even the worst possibility—that Senator David Boren's plan might limit Social Security COLAs—didn't apply to the $600-a-month widow the Post story describes...

...Here's how the proposed tax hike would work," the report said...

...Mainly because of the reportorial tendency to depend on authoritative voices instead of asking independent questions...

...Federal employees are asking for—and are very close to getting—the best of both worlds...

...Not incidentally, it's the feds who write the descriptions...

...cost $170 billion in 1994, and, even if the Senate had enacted the $35 billion figure, Medicare would have hit $235 billion by 1998 instead of $262 billion...

...Some top bureaucrats hit six figures-plus in wages alone...

...Social Security pensioners are getting twice to 10 times as much back as they would if their Social Security contributions, plus interest, had been invested otherwise...

...Think of it this way: There are federal employees in every congressional district in the country...

...Taxing Social Security benefits is like jamming a broomstick in retirees' wheelchair spokes...

...That means people near the cutoff probably will be paying a 15, 28, or 31 percent rate...

...A familiar statistic when bureaucratic salaries come up for review, it has worked its way into the culture since 1969, when salaries were supposed to be tied to what a federal worker could bring down in the private sector...

...States News Service, in its wire copy to subscriber papers, routinely repeats the figure...

...If your total exceeds $25,000 a year for individuals or $32,000 for couples, you'd be subject to a new tax rate of 85 percent...

...On the day Senator John Glenn's Government Operations committee passed its version of Hatch Act reform in May (it had already quietly passed the House), a Gannett wire service report said this, relying heavily on a Glenn press release: A federal employee can give a candidate up to $1,000 per election, but can't volunteer to stuff envelopes or answer telephones at that candidate's headquarters...

...in Atlanta, 27 percent...

...The elderly con was on...

...One problem: The statistic is bogus...

...This is a big issue, worth billions in federal benefits, but unless Cristophe gets involved somehow, it's probably not going to be covered...

...The reporter meant to say that 85 percent of benefits would be subject to the regular income tax rate you pay on your other income—nobody's going to be paying an 85 percent tax rate...

...Yet things are not uniformly bleak...

...Of course, there is a large technical press that caters to specific audiences...

...It's easier to find a widow who, understandably confused by the Washington give-and-take, will say this of an ill-defined "entitlement cap": "I think it means that if everything keeps going up the way it is, I won't be able to afford to live...

...Buoyant and sporting a red bow tie, the New York senator played the avuncular elder statesman on ABC's "This Week With David Brinkley," discoursing on politics and philosophy with Sam Donaldson and George Will...

...ABC is poking around the bureaucracy more, especially on government waste...

...They can still contribute money to campaigns and sport yard signs or bumpers tickers...

...In the $25,000 to $30,000 range, it's $42 a year...

...After Clinton targeted the 2 million-strong federal workforce in February for a freeze on new raises, the employees' unions and members of Congress from bureaucrat-rich areas like Virginia and Maryland began playing the pay gap con...

...Job security —it's virtually impossible to fire a federal employee—is one huge advantage...

...For most run-of-the-mill journalists, taxes, spending, and the bureaucracy form a huge blind spot, and that blindness has important consequences: Half-baked reporting becomes conventional wisdom, which in turn affects major policy decisions...

...The truth is that Moynihan was talking about possibly slowing the growth of Medicare over the next five years...

...That's a massive political army ready to march...

...This magazine, for example, has long advocated just such a system to keep government accountable and encourage short-term stays in public service...

...As a fed rises in seniority, he gets 20 days —in effect, four weeks...

...If that were on the mark, then older folks could be excused for taking an extra dose of Geritol to calm down...

...While reducing COLAs for people at the bottom of the ladder is unfair, means testing is not, especially considering what the middle class is getting from the government...

...none of the networks has covered the repeal...

...In 1990, for example, every American over 65 collected an average of $11,400 in federal benefits—tax-sheltered Social Security and Medicare among them, while 3.7 million senior citizens lived below the poverty line...

...Leave aside the fact that, in 1992, the federal quit rate was about 6 percent, and there's no shortage of applicants for jobs...

...Another generic con is that beneficiaries are only "getting back what they paid in...

...T]he administration is looking at the part of the budget that includes Medicare and Social Security" while running a video clip of a nurse lifting an elderly man in a polka-dotted hospital gown from a wheelchair...

...After all, reporters think the romance in journalism is in horsetrading politics, not in government, and they tend to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the details of policy...

...But while civil servants want to be able to elect such politicians, they are unwilling to go the whole distance and put themselves on the line by giving up their tenure-protected jobs if their party loses...

...Leslie L. Byrne (D-Va...

...They want the advantage of politics, the right to campaign for a candidate who will be favorably disposed to pay raises, COLAs, generous pensions, and all the rest...

...That gap is being used to justify healthy pay raises —about $1.8 billion worth—for federal employees across the country in the next few years...

...For good measure, one of them is legally blind and just had shoulder replacement surgery...

...I'm calling my congressman...

...These are good signs...

...Where private sector workers generally get two weeks of paid vacation a year, the most junior federal employees get what the government refers to as "13 days...

...States News Service, for instance, took the Gannett route and stenographically reported the story...

...So what's wrong with that...

...By emphasizing the little-old-lady-in-tennis-shoes aspect of campaign work, the reporter has accepted Glenn's con that Hatch is only about benign volunteer work...

...Here are three other cons the media habitually fall for when they cover the federal establishment—a world where cuts aren't cuts, statistics can be cooked, and interested parties can fool reporters who don't have a feel for the inside game...

...There's no question that we're not serious about covering government," says Hodding Carter, a journalist and a former Carter State Department official...

...now, most reporters understand that there are some economic distinctions among the elderly...

...Those calls are made all the time, and the result is a Congress that carries water for very particular groups of constituents...

...So while the Senate considered the five-year budget plan, much of the media failed to explain what the dramatic talk about Medicare would mean for the people on Medicare...

...The worker can express political opinions, but can't give a speech even in a party caucus...

...pointed out that federal wages lag about 29 percent behind comparable private sector pay...

...No major report, however, has noted this inconsistency or the price to the public of emasculating the Hatch Act without simultaneously doing away with federal sinecures...

...Even those feds who argue that there was a genuine pay gap when they came on the job in the sixties —and for some jobs that was true then and is true now—are retiring well...

...the better-off elderly will pay a 36 percent rate if their combined income is over $200,000 on up to 40 percent at the highest levels...

...Pulling a sheet of paper from his suit pocket, Moynihan suggested that $35 billion could come out of Medicare...

...Not often, except in spectacular cases like the savings and loan collapse or the Reagan HUD scandals...

...Bush and Ford both vetoed similar measures...

...The New York Times has drily recorded the bill's progress...

...Now that tax is supposed to target recipients who don't depend on Social Security in order to live . . . [But] some older Americans don't think they should have to pay more for benefits they earned long ago...

...In Boston, 16 percent...

...And civil servants, for instance, can retire at age 55 after 30 years on the job with generous pensions tied to the Consumer Price Index...

...And in the intervening years, annual COLAs on the order of 9 percent in 1980 to 4 percent in recent years still outstripped private raises...

...Simple market economics tells us there's got to be some reason people want to work for the government...

...30 percent of government employees make over $40,000 just in salary, which can go as high as $85,000...

...The average fed makes $36,279 ($45,000 in Washington...

...Since 1939, the Hatch Act has barred federal employees from active electioneering...

...Let's pretend, though, that federal employees are getting the financial shaft...

...It's awfully hard to shine when the world is wearing you down,' she told [Alice] Rivlin...

...Medicare will Research assistance for this article was provided by Danny Franklin, Spencer Freedman, Nicholas Joseph, Jennifer Levitsky, and Genevieve Murphy...

...With minimal literary flair, for example, fairly routine responsibilities can begin to sound a lot like Julius Caesar's...

...Near the end of the interview, Moynihan was asked where Senate Democrats, who were taking up the budget in the coming week, might find "more spending reductions...

...Millions on Fixed Incomes Watch Deficit Fight—and Their Budgets...

...But according to the government, 91 percent of federal engineers are engaged in such groundbreaking, Galilean research...

...For those reasons and others, a bipartisan group of House members and senators want to overhaul the 1938 Hatch Act, which restricts political activity by federal workers...

...It's easier to quote a spokesman with a statistic than to dig around to see if it has the virtue of being true...

...But a Hatched employee—there are about 3 million—can't be more involved than that in campaigns...

...To get what they want, people with a special stake in how the government spends money—seniors and bureaucrats in particular—can gull the media into shilling a party line, especially when the issue is complicated or obscure...

...On the CBS "Evening News," correspondent Eric Enberg intoned...

...But most Americans don't pore over the pages of Governing magazine or even the mainstream financial press...

...If a reporter isn't calling on his set of agencies pretty much every day and staying on top of them," says Gene Roberts, the former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "it means that whatever stories do come along are going to be done on a crash-diet basis, and that's almost always unsatisfactory...

...The increase is expected to bring in $32 billion over five years, but the cost to the 60 percent of Social Security recipients who make less than $25,000 a year is zero...

...Sounds fair enough—until you realize that it means 13 work days, which is, counting weekends, two-and-a-half weeks...

...That way, if the voters hate the level of service they're getting, they can vote out not only their lawmaker or president but the employees who have helped contribute to the dissatisfaction...

...The chief suspect in all of this is that federal job descriptions are inflated," says Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist who studies government wages...

...Heck, you might think, why not let the GS-11 go down to Senator X's headquarters if he wants to...

...the benefits...

...Jesus, they're beating up on the elderly...

...A congressman or a senator or a president elected with a network of organized civil service support is going to have debts to pay off—and you can bet those debts won't get paid on the backs of the civil service by cutting salaries or streamlining regulation...

...And that reason must be...

...The Office of Management and Budget has challenged the pay survey's accuracy, and at least one analysis of federal-versus-private wages from 1948 to 1990 by Krueger and Lawrence Katz of Harvard (Katz is now the chief economist of the Department of Labor) found average pay actually higher for federal workers...

...The employee can put a political poster in his or her yard or car, but can't wave it at a political rally...

...Nevertheless, the gap myth endures...

...But the people who are going to be taxed by the new plan don't make very good copy: They're silver-haired Rotarians and cruise ship aficionados, not the at-risk elderly...

...Senior citizens, who vote more in larger numbers than any other segment of the population, will not forget, nor will they forgive you," the Council of Senior Citizens' Larry Smedley warned on ABC...

...Still, there's a temptation, because Social Security affects old people, to overdramatize with widows-and-or-phans stories instead of pointing out the inequities in the system...

...In covering the bill's progress, it's become routine not to explore its potential impact...

...Hatch Act reform is not exactly up there with middle-class tax relief or abortion as a hot-button, focus-group kind of issue, but it has enormous implications for how Washington—and the rest of the federal establishment—works...

...At this point in the national debate over government spending, reporters who rely on interest group spokesmen or the grizzled poor are helping turn the inviolability of entitlements into a self-fulfilling prophecy...