medicaid

Continuing our coverage of attempts by conservatives to wage generational warfare on the issue of entitlements, I'd encourage everyone to read this opinion piece by Robert Kuttner in today's Washington Post. As the President's suddently-low-key entitlement summit is underway today, Kuttner skillfully pulls apart the disingenuous arguments of so-called deficit hawks and tries to drive a stake into the heart of the "generational theft" meme:

The deficit hawks' story also contends that we are sacrificing our children's future by too much (deficit) spending on the elderly. In fact, today's young adults are already falling out of the middle class because of the high costs of the investments we don't adequately finance socially -- child care, college tuition and health insurance. But fiscal conservatives seldom call for increased investment in the young. Today's young, of course, will be tomorrow's retirees, and they will need social insurance, too.

The overall bottom line? The economy we bequeath to our children has everything to do with getting growth back on track and almost nothing to do with imagined future deficits.

Also worth checking out today is a new project of Demos and the Century Foundation: The Fiscal High Road. It's a data-rich site meant to push back on the misleading arguments and generational claims made by the Petersen Foundation and other "entitlement reformers." Here's a quick slideshow they put together explaining the status of three distinct programs - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - that are often disingenuously lumped together under the term "entitlements."

As an aside, while I think this slide show has some great graphs and data in it, and I'm glad to see Demos and the Century Foundation pushing these ideas, they might be better served repackaging this data in a short video/animation (like this) rather than as a Power Point presentation.

Speaking of conservative talking points aimed at scaring youth about future debt, MSNBC's First Read is reporting that the Peter Petersen Foundation is set to launch a $1 million ad blitz about the need for entitlement reform:

As the Senate debates an economic stimulus plan whose price tag could come close to $900 billion, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation -- a non-partisan group created to bring awareness to the nation's rising spending and entitlement costs -- is launching an ad campaign [pdf] to urge the Obama White House and Congress to address long-term fiscal challenges.

That campaign began today with a print advertisement in the Washington Post and Roll Call. "Today's economic crisis is just the tip of the iceberg," the ad says, with the picture of a gigantic iceberg. "We must also focus on a much larger yet less visible threat: the $56 trillion in liabilities and unfunded retirement and health care obligations (that’s $483,000 per U.S. household), and the dangerous reliance on foreign lenders, that threaten our ship of state."

Tomorrow, Peterson Foundation president Dave Walker -- along with Sens. Kent Conrad (D) and George Voinovich (R), and Reps. Frank Wolf (R) and Jim Cooper (D) -- will hold a press conference to announce the group's full plans for a $1 million-plus advertising campaign.

Petersen has long been an opponent of entitlements and a promoter of generational warfare narratives. Most recently, his foundation was behind the production and distribution of IOUSA, a scare-tastic look at America's debt and entitlement programs that was thoroughly debunked as one-sided and misleading by the Center for Economic Policy Research.

Entitlement reform and debt will be the wedge issues that Republicans try to use to divide the Millennial Generation and the Democratic Party. This new ad blitz by the Petersen Foundation is probably laying the groundwork for those arguments.