So, you want fair and balanced.

Oh, How Unfair!
By Joseph Walther


This past Friday, a friend of mine said to me, “I am a social liberal but a fiscal conservative.” A couple of days earlier, I listened as a local talk radio host bemoaned a lack of fair and balanced reporting by the mainstream liberal media. My friend sounds confused to me. I’d like to know how socially liberal he is. He makes me think that he wants the government involved in social issues but he doesn’t want to pay for it. The talk show host, though sincere, is just as confusing. He confuses defending a position with objectivity. Absolutists see things as either black or white. Relativists see things as shades of grey. The electronic news media always paint issues as either red or blue. I don’t know about any of you, but I think that all of this misses the mark by miles.

I asked my friend to give me a couple of examples. He said, “Working class parents should have free day care, paid for out of federal taxes. This would be a tremendous help for single parents.” His second example pertained to Social Security. He does not want it discontinued but he thinks that people should be able to divert part of their FICA withholdings to private investment accounts. He claims that it’s “our own” money. He also stated emphatically that he would not support a federal tax increase to cover the free day care. “There’s plenty of government waste. Let them find the money there,” he said.

The former is extreme social liberalism at its core. The latter tries to disguise social liberalism as fiscal conservatism. It also points up how much people misunderstand the purpose of social security at its root. Being a pragmatic SOB, I thought I’d test my friend’s logic.

I asked him what he thought about state mandated, all-day, public school kindergarten. Is he pro or con? His response floored me. “That’s one of the ways the government wastes money. This kind of program is nothing more than the teacher unions trying to get more money for nothing,” he yelled. I then told him that all of the academic experts have said that education only accounts for about 20% of what goes on in day care. He not only agreed with this, he used it as further justification for shooting the idea down. “But you support free day care for working parents,” I replied. “I do! What’s your point,” he asked.

I explained to him that if the “experts” are correct, then mandatory all-day kindergarten amounts to nothing more than taxpayer-sponsored day care. You should be absolutely giddy with joy, I told him. The feds, however, would not have to raise taxes to pay for it. By classifying the issue as matter of local education, the states and counties would be raising property taxes to cover it.

Now, let’s discuss social security from a factual perspective instead of an emotional one. The Legislative Branch, at both the federal and state levels of government, has the authority to levy taxes. Once the legislature levies a tax and defines its terms, those covered owe the money. It is no longer our money in the possessive sense of the word. It is only our money in the sense that, in a democracy, the citizens are the government.

Those who continue to claim that collected FICA is their own money are using the same flawed logic as gamblers. They win some amount of money, continue gambling and lose it back to the house, and then rationalize their stupidity by stating that they were using the house’s money. Once you win the money, it is yours. If you gamble it back, you’ve lost your own money. The house laughs all the way to the bank.

Congress enacted Social Security as a minimal financial safety net for those people in financial difficulty later in life. No one ever intended FICA to be a sole pension source, but rather a supplement to a pension.

FICA is a tax. Working people owe it. It’s a bill. It is not a personal investment account opened in our individual names. The federal government collects the money from us workers during any pay period and transfers it to legally qualified recipients. The federal government then transfers any funds left over to the slush… I mean general fund for other worthwhile projects, like paying $600 for toilet seats.

Granted, we may not like this situation. We have a constitutional right to petition our respective congressional delegations to repeal it. May I suggest that the complainers either do this or shut up?

Let’s talk about fair and balanced. I think that we should have the right to electrocute anyone who uses this phrase in the same context as opinion. Radio opinion talk show hosts, TV political analysts, and print media editorialists are not fair and balanced. Those who attempt to be so do not stay in the public limelight very long. If you’d like to conduct your own research, here’s how.

Every major news outlet with Internet access conducts online polls. The mainstream outlets of ABC, NBC, and CBS publish weekly opinion polls on their respective web sites. The same is true of the cable networks: FOX, MSNBC, CNN, and TNN, along with a variety of those specialty shows. The locals do the same thing. Here in the thriving metropolis of New Castle County, Delaware, the News Journal places its daily poll on its web site, www.delawareonline.com. A local radio talk show on WDEL places its polls on at www.wdel.com.

Statistically, the polls are meaningless. Such online polls are devoid of randomness, a fundamental tenet of statistical validity. They serve no other purpose than to find the pulse of their respective audiences. Log onto either of the two sites listed above and check the results. The News Journal’s poll will have distinctively liberal results, while the WDEL poll will have distinctively conservative results. Oh, did I mention that the News Journal is Delaware’s print media liberal Mecca and that WDEL is just another way to define conservative? Here’s an example of what I mean from the local people.

This past Friday on WDEL’s Rick Jensen Show, the “lefty” half of the show, Gerry Fulcher, referred to a quote attributed to William Bennett, former Federal Secretary of Education. The News Journal quoted Bennett as saying, “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Fulcher blasted Bennett directly. Had Fulcher been fair and balanced, he would have questioned the context. His counter-part was not as quick to judge. Jensen, the “right” side of the fair and balanced equation, questioned the context in which Bennett made the quote. However, he was not being fair and balanced. He was just defending a fellow conservative.

Jensen was correct. I am not a member of William Bennett’s fan club. However, he is a card-carrying member of the pro-life movement. There is no way that this man would advocate aborting a fetus for any reason. Neither is he a racist in any sense of the word. He is, on the other hand, difficult for a “lefty” to stomach simply because he states the obvious is such an inflammable way that I wonder if he has all of his own teeth.

The bottom line of this is that if you want to read the entire conversation in context, just go here. The point that Bennett attempted to make is obvious. His words, however, gave his political enemies some great ammunition. I, admittedly, was ready to lynch him! Is Bill Bennett a racist? Of course, he’s not. Is he stupid for saying what he said? YES!

People tune into FOX because they are conservative and want to listen to similar views. Listeners of the other new networks do the same thing for the same reasons. So please, stop using the phrase: fair and balanced.

Have a great week.
Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Send email to: publisher@thetruefacts.com