Hillary Clinton made the following accusation against Rep. Rick Lazio last night in their debate, according to an excerpt in the Times: "He voted to cut $270 billion from Medicare."
This is just totally misleading, and the New York Times lets Mrs. Clinton get away with it entirely unchallenged. When President Clinton and the congressional Democrats tried to pull this stunt back in 1995, the Washington Post wrote an editorial stating that the Democrats "have shamelessly used the issue, demagogued on it."
A news story in the New York Times about the issue on September 27, 1996, reported that "Democrats would reduce growth by $124 billion over seven years by cutting reimbursements to doctors and hospitals and using managed care programs; Republicans would scale back by $158 billion and increase premiums and co-payments." If Mrs. Clinton really thinks a reduction in growth is a "cut," even when it means that spending is increasing in absolute terms, she should be attacking her husband for proposing to "cut" $124 billion from Medicare.
Medicare spending skyrocketed to $177 billion in 1996 from $53 billion in 1983, according to a 1996 article in Reason magazine. The Republican proposed "cuts" actually were a 40% increase over current levels of Medicare spending. The Democratic willingness to attack the Republicans for "cuts," when what the Republicans wanted to do was take Medicare spending from $4,800 per recipient in 1995 to $6,700 per recipient in 2002, was so breathtaking that CNN's Wolf Blitzer even asked President Clinton about it at a 1996 press conference: "Mr. President, your most recent Clinton-Gore campaign commercials still speak about Republican cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. Speaker Gingrich points out repeatedly that these aren't 'cuts' in Medicare and Medicaid; they are simply cuts in the projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid, which you in your own seven-year balanced budget proposal similarly propose. Are you prepared to stop calling the Republican savings in Medicare and Medicaid 'cuts'?"
The answer, apparently, was that not only was Mr. Clinton unwilling to stop the Mediscare demagoguery, but that Mrs. Clinton would eventually stoop to the tactic herself in an effort to get elected to the Senate from New York.
While ignoring the Medicare demagoguery, the front-page Times story on the debate does manage to refer to Mr. Lazio as having "voted with Republicans in shutting down the government in 1994." The government shut-down was in 1995.
Times Tower: A story inside the metro section of today's Times reports on possible designs for the new Times headquarters tower near Times Square. But the article strangely omits any reference to the negotiations with the city and state over the Times company's demand for a huge tax break on the tower. We use the word "huge" advisedly; in a news story today, the Times refers to George W. Bush's proposed tax cut as "large" and "huge." The Times story tries to make the Bush tax cut seem large by describing it as a $1.3 trillion tax cut, which is its approximate cost over ten years. The article manages not to mention the projected federal surplus over ten years; it only discusses a much smaller surplus, a $268 billion one-year surplus. In fact, Mr. Bush's tax cut plan is not "large" or "huge" but relatively modest when compared with the ten year surplus or with other Republican plans such as that of Steve Forbes, or even when compared with the tax break the Times is seeking for its own tower.