Washington Spent the Money.

Apparently, the Problem Is Grandma

The Washington Post editorial board has apparently recently discovered that Social Security and Medicare are in trouble, and they are shocked, shocked, I tell you!

That part is true, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. This is a fact that anyone not living under a rock has known for a very long time. According to the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in late 2032. At that point, incoming revenue would cover only about 78 percent of scheduled benefits. Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in 2033. These are serious problems that have been developing for decades, and Congress has known about them for decades. As have the we the American people.

But in a remarkably biased editorial titled “To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state,” the entire Washington Post editorial board manages to take a story about decades of federal fiscal irresponsibility, demographic change and the extraordinary cost of American medicine and turn it into a story about seniors having too much money.

The underlying fiscal problem is real. The editorial analysis of how we got here, and particularly who should now be made to pay for it, is considerably less impressive.

The Money Wasn’t “Not Saved”

The first bit of editorial sleight of hand comes almost immediately. The Post explains that for many years Social Security collected more in payroll taxes than it paid in benefits. Then it tells readers that “the government didn’t save that extra money.” Instead, Social Security bought Treasury bonds and the government spent the money.

That formulation is technically clever and editorially sloppy. The Social Security surplus did not simply disappear. By law, the trust funds invested their reserves in interest-bearing obligations of the United States Treasury. The Treasury then borrowed and spent that money. Those are two different transactions, and collapsing them into the phrase “the government didn’t save it” obscures the most important part of the story.

If I purchase a Treasury bond, the Treasury will spend the money I lent it. That does not mean my Treasury security somehow ceases to exist. It means the United States government owes me money. The same principle applies to Social Security. For decades, American workers paid Social Security taxes in excess of the benefits being paid to retirees. The federal government borrowed those surpluses, issued Treasury obligations to the trust funds, and spent the borrowed money elsewhere. Now Social Security needs those securities redeemed, which means Treasury has to obtain the money through taxes, spending reductions, or additional borrowing.

That is a genuine federal fiscal problem. But it is not the same thing as saying the money was never saved, nor does it somehow make the Treasury securities held by Social Security imaginary assets.

In fact, the accurate description is more damning. Washington borrowed decades of Social Security surpluses to help finance the rest of government. Now that Social Security needs the money back, the sages of the Washington Post editorial board tell us the problem is the “retirement state.”

Medicare Benefits Are Not a Christmas Present

The Post then informs us that a married couple earning around $100,000 and turning 65 in 2025 can expect to receive Medicare benefits worth 4.4 times what they paid in Medicare payroll taxes. It is an effective statistic because it makes Medicare sound like an extraordinarily generous gift bestowed upon retirees at the expense of everyone else. Except Medicare was never designed as an individual retirement savings account, something the Post itself acknowledges, and there is another rather important problem with this comparison (beyond the overt incitement of inter-generational conflict).

The “value” of those Medicare benefits is largely a measure of what Medicare pays for American medical care. If a hospital charges Medicare $30,000 for a procedure, the elderly patient did not suddenly become $30,000 richer. The American medical system charged $30,000. Those are not remotely the same thing. Yet the Post uses the enormous cost of Medicare benefits as evidence of Medicare's generosity to its recipients, without spending nearly enough time asking why the underlying medical care costs so much in the first place.

That omission matters because the United States has one of the most expensive health-care systems in the world. Drug prices, hospital consolidation, administrative overhead, specialty drugs, provider monopolies, site-of-service pricing and the increasingly complicated Medicare Advantage system all contribute to what taxpayers ultimately spend. Medicare Advantage payments for Parts A and B alone reached roughly $534 billion in 2025, and serious policy organizations across the political spectrum have raised concerns about overpayments associated with coding practices and other features of the program.

There are obvious places to start reining in Medicare costs before asking seniors to pay more: attack fraud and improper payments, audit Medicare Advantage plans more aggressively, reduce administrative waste, move care to lower-cost settings when medically appropriate, and force down inflated drug prices. Dr. Mehmet Oz is already pursuing several of these at CMS, including auditing every eligible Medicare Advantage contract, tightening fraud enforcement, reforming payment for outpatient care and continuing Medicare drug-price negotiations. CMS reports that its program-integrity efforts produced $41.9 billion in savings in fiscal 2025 alone.

Before deciding that Grandma is receiving too much Medicare, perhaps we should first ask whether taxpayers are paying rational prices for Grandma’s medical care. Those are very different questions. The Post focuses heavily on how much Medicare spends on beneficiaries while giving remarkably little attention to why the underlying medical care has become so expensive.

Apparently, the Problem Is Grandma

This is where the editorial’s underlying philosophy becomes much clearer. The Post argues that “a big chunk of Social Security benefits goes to people who don’t need them,” pointing out that more than one-third of benefits supposedly go to seniors with incomes above $100,000.

Notice what has happened to the language. These are no longer Americans who spent 40 or 50 years paying Social Security taxes. They are now people who “don’t need” the money from the fund that they have paid into. The fact that they paid into the system throughout their working lives becomes secondary to the editorial board’s judgment about how much money they should be allowed to have in retirement. Yet more incitement of inter-generational conflict.

This would fundamentally change what Social Security is. Social Security has historically functioned as social insurance. You work, you pay into the system, your employer pays into the system, and your eventual benefit is calculated according to a statutory formula based upon your earnings history. The benefit formula is already progressive, but Social Security is deliberately not structured as an ordinary welfare program.

The Post wants to move toward something quite different: a means-tested benefit for poorer retirees combined with compulsory private savings for everybody else. It explicitly praises versions of that model used elsewhere. That is a perfectly legitimate policy position, but it should be described honestly. This is not merely “saving Social Security.”

Their plan would transform Social Security from an earned retirement benefit, financed by mandatory contributions over a lifetime of work and provided with the expectation that those contributions would produce benefits at retirement, into something much closer to a means-tested welfare program. That is not a minor adjustment. It changes the basic bargain under which Americans have paid Social Security taxes for generations.

The editorial also barely considers an incentive problem. Imagine two people who earn approximately the same amount over their working lives. One spends almost everything. The other saves diligently, contributes to retirement accounts, pays off a home, invests carefully, and perhaps builds a small business. Both paid Social Security taxes for 40 years. When they retire, Washington looks at the second person and says that because she behaved responsibly and accumulated substantial assets, she no longer “needs” the Social Security benefit she paid into.

We have now created a penalty for thrift. The irony is that the Post itself celebrates the enormous growth in private retirement savings as evidence that America has changed since Social Security was created. Americans responded to decades of government encouragement to save for retirement, accumulated wealth, and now that accumulated wealth becomes the justification for reducing the benefits they spent their working lives financing. That is quite a trick, but the Washington Post editorial board seems to have no self-awareness of their sleight of hand.

Then Comes Medicare Rationing

The Medicare proposal is even more revealing. The Post recommends limiting the addition of new services to Medicare because much of future spending growth will come from coverage of new treatments. It presents this as politically attractive because existing services would not have to be reduced. That language is wonderfully antiseptic, but what it describes is rationing.

Today’s senior keeps today’s cancer treatment. Tomorrow’s senior may not receive tomorrow’s cancer treatment because Medicare decides it is too expensive to cover. This is the chronic problem that pervades socialized medicine programs throughout the world. Just ask seniors north of the border in the people’s republic of Canada. The Canadian government’s response to this problem appears to be their medical assistance in dying legislation (MAID). Perhaps some form of rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis really is necessary. No health-care system has unlimited resources, and there is a legitimate debate about whether every new drug or technology that produces a marginal benefit should automatically be purchased by taxpayers at whatever price a manufacturer demands.

But the editorial board should at least have the courage to describe the policy accurately. “Limiting the addition of new services” sounds considerably nicer than telling Americans that Medicare may decline to cover future medical innovations because the government cannot afford them. The distinction is especially important when some of the fastest-growing areas of Medicare spending involve precisely these new drugs, biologics and specialty treatments.

Having softened the language around restricting future care, the editorial arrives at its other preferred solution: “average seniors should be paying more than they currently pay.” There it is. The federal government has an enormous Medicare financing problem, and after remarkably little examination of why American medicine costs what it does, the Post concludes that ordinary retirees should reach further into their pockets.

Well, that certainly benefits the medical-industrial complex.

Seniors should pay for Congress's folly!

What is most striking about the editorial is how quickly retirees become the obvious place to look for money. Where is the serious discussion of hospital consolidation and monopoly pricing? Where are the drug costs, administrative expenses, Medicare Advantage overpayments, aggressive coding practices, fraud and improper payments? Where is the serious examination of why the United States manages to spend so much more on health care than other developed countries?

The Social Security discussion is similarly narrow. Legitimate arguments can be made about changes to the taxable wage base, payroll taxes, retirement ages, benefit formulas, labor force participation, economic growth, productivity, and immigration. None of these offers a painless solution, and that is precisely the point. A serious examination of Social Security insolvency should force readers to confront the costs and tradeoffs of the major alternatives.

Instead, the Post offers a remarkably convenient progression. Social Security and Medicare face insolvency. Seniors have accumulated substantial wealth. Therefore, seniors should receive less Social Security and pay more for Medicare. That is not an actuarial conclusion forced upon us by mathematics. It is a policy preference about who should bear the burden, presented as though it naturally follows from the fiscal numbers.

The “Retirement State”

Perhaps the most revealing phrase appears in the headline itself. The Post calls Social Security and Medicare the “retirement state.” Not the federal spending problem. Not the entitlement-financing problem. Not the health-care cost problem. The retirement state.

By the end of the article, America’s elderly have become “the nation’s wealthiest generation,” possessing “significant wealth to draw on.” That framing subtly changes the nature of the debate. Someone will have to take the fall, so let's make retirees the source of this evil. A structural problem created by demographics, medical inflation, congressional promises, decades of federal borrowing, and the unwillingness of successive administrations to confront politically difficult choices becomes an intergenerational distribution problem. Older Americans have accumulated too much. Therefore, government should give them less and charge them more.

There is also a larger ideological pattern here that the Post does not disclose. This is hardly the first time its opinion pages have portrayed older Americans as having accumulated too much wealth at the expense of the young. Just last week, the Post published an essay titled “Shift the safety net toward the young,” explicitly arguing that government redistributes too much from young people to old people. In July came “No more regressive subsidies for seniors,” which described Americans between 65 and 74 as the wealthiest age group and argued against giving them additional tax protection. In March, another Post opinion called for limiting Social Security benefits for affluent retirees, and last year its opinion pages complained that federal policy was favoring older Americans while neglecting younger generations.

What all of this really reveals is a strong, consistent ageist bias at the Washington Post editorial board, beneath which resides a familiar subtext. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The hidden subtext is a fundamental tenet of Marxist philosophy.

There is something deeply strange about this emerging redistributionist argument. Much of the wealth held by older Americans exists precisely because they worked, saved, invested, bought homes and contributed to retirement accounts for forty or fifty years. Of course a 70-year-old normally has more accumulated wealth than a 30-year-old. That is how a lifetime of saving is supposed to work. Yet the Post increasingly treats the successful accumulation of retirement wealth almost as evidence of unfairness, and then uses that wealth to justify reducing the benefits those same people spent their working lives paying for. This is redistribution by generation rather than simply by income, with responsible saving eventually becoming the justification for taking more from those who saved. The Post is entitled to advocate that philosophy. It should at least acknowledge what it is doing, but perhaps that is asking too much from this “progressive” narrative-enforcement engine, long characterized as “Pravda on the Potomac”.

Social Security and Medicare absolutely need reform. Pretending otherwise is irresponsible. The 2026 Trustees put Social Security’s combined 75-year actuarial deficit at 4.42 percent of taxable payroll, and the dates at which the trust funds encounter serious financing problems are no longer safely buried in some distant future. Something will have to change, and pretending there is a painless solution is no more responsible than pretending there is no problem.

But there is an enormous difference between acknowledging that reality and quietly deciding who should pay for it. The federal government spent decades borrowing Social Security surpluses. Congress ran enormous deficits under both parties. Washington tolerated, subsidized, and helped construct one of the most expensive medical systems in the world. Politicians repeatedly refused to confront Social Security and Medicare financing because doing so was politically unpleasant.

Now the bill has arrived, and the Washington Post editorial board has identified the problem.

Apparently, America’s retirees just have too much money, and what is needed is a good dose of intergenerational wealth redistribution, ideally coupled to struggle sessions for the guilty elders. Now, please remind me, where have we seen this movie before? When the Washington Post editorial board clearly demonstrates their political philosophical bias, you should believe them. By their actions, you will know them.

JGM/RWM

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