Stephanie Coleman created Tre Magazine, showing perseverance. She proves dedication to one’s craft pays off. The New York Times is trying to play fair and balanced by allowing liars to write.
Stephanie Coleman on perseverance
Founder of Tre Magazine Stephanie Coleman
Stephanie Coleman, founder and publisher of Tre Magazine is no stranger to either KPFT 90.1 FM Houston or Politics Done Right (PDR). Of course, she has been a part of the Open Journal talk program for a long time.
Stephanie appeared on PDR during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I had moved in with my daughter in Washington, DC, as she was recovering from her second stroke. As usual, Ms. Coleman was inspiring. Many magazines, for various reasons, were unable to survive and thrive through the ordeal. She did. And it was no easy task. Today she tells her story and gives us some positive affirmation about the art of perseverance and more.
NY Times allowing liars space to write.
Senior economist Dean Baker called out the New York Times for its false balance by allowing a charlatan to write a misleading article on Social Security. I have interviewed Baker more than once. While he is not the MMT type economist like Stephanie Kelton or Richard Wolff, he believes in a capitalist economy that does not pilfer as the current one does. IMHO, the rules he would apply would have all the humane economists converge in the same place.
Baker wrote:
Guess so since it gave Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, plenty of space to say things that are extremely deceptive, if not outright lies. The gist of Riedl’s piece is that it will not be possible to sustain Social Security and Medicare without tax increases on the middle class.
Much of the piece is the standard line about an aging population posing an impossible burden that we have been reading about in the NYT and elsewhere for many decades. For example, Riedl includes an old favorite:
The ratio of workers supporting each retiree, which was about 5:1 back in 1960, will fall to just over 2:1 by the next decade.
This is, of course, largely true. The deceptive part is that most of the decline in the ratio of workers to retirees took place long ago. The ratio of covered workers to beneficiaries had dropped to 3.2:1 by 1975. It hovered around this level until the baby boomers began to retire at the end of the first decade of the century.
The ratio of workers to retirees is now down to 2.8 to 1. It is projected to fall to 2.4 to 1 by the next decade. Are you scared yet?
Riedl also tells us, “people who live until age 90, a fast-growing group, will spend one-third of their adult life collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits.” There are two problems with this assertion.
First, the people who live to 90 will be disproportionately higher-income workers. Many will have delayed collecting Social Security benefits until they are age 70, or close to it. Also, if they continue working and have employer-provided health insurance, Medicare will not be the primary payer until they retire. If “adult life” starts at age 18, then we are looking at people who live to age 90 collecting benefits for a bit more than a quarter of their adult life (20 years out of 72 years).
But the more important point is that life expectancies have not increased for everyone. As a recent report from the Congressional Research Service documented, there has been almost no increase in life expectancy at age 65 for workers in the bottom half of the income distribution. The story of increasing life expectancies is overwhelming, a story of higher income workers living longer.
Read the entire piece. This is the article that should be in the New York Times.
