By Jon Cassidy | Watchdog.org

Jon Cassidy

Vice President Joe Biden told a series of lies at a campaign event in Green Bay, Wis., Sunday, accusing Republican  candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan of planning “massive” cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, education and anything else he thought might get a rise out of his audience.

As political scare-mongering goes, it was banal. But Biden got challenged, for once, by the fact-checkers.

Sorta.

PolitiFact Wisconsin did a fact-check on one of Biden’s claims — that Romney and Ryan “are for massive cuts in Social Security for future generations.” They found it Half True.

It’s not. Even the boldest reform plans call for no more than slowing the growth in entitlement costs, not actual cuts, and Romney and Ryan haven’t put out a detailed plan on Social Security.

Let’s review the claim PolitiFact half-liked, and then look at some of Biden’s other lies Sunday that went overlooked.

Nothing is more attractive to demagogues than lying to old people about the other party’s plans for Medicare and Social Security. This has been going on for years, and it’s the media’s fault. The candidates do it to get elected; but the media have no excuse for being too lazy, too ignorant, or too timid to tell the truth about the spiraling cost of these two programs, which now make up 36 percent of the federal budget.

Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable at current tax rates. This is not a new observation. For the past half-century, life expectancy has increased, fertility rates have declined, and the costs of health care have risen dramatically. As the baby boomers retire, the declining ratio of workers to retirees will require some tax and spending adjustments.

According to current estimates by the trustees of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds, the Medicare trust fund will be empty by 2024, and the Social Security trust fund will be broke by 2033.

At that point, tax revenue would be enough to fund 75 percent of promised Social Security benefits, and between 67 and 87 percent of Medicare benefits, according to the trustees.

In other words, benefit cuts are on the way now, unless enough Washington politicians can find the courage and honesty to deal with a simple math problem without tearing each other to shreds over it.

This is the basic context for any serious discussion of entitlement reform, but it appears only on the fringes of PolitiFact’s analysis.

Romney and Ryan both like an idea called progressive price indexing, which was proposed in 2005 by a finance executive named Robert C. Pozen. PolitiFact spends most of the article going over various versions of the approach, trying to figure whether any of them might count as a cut.

They don’t. Here’s what progressive price indexing means, as paraphrased from the impeccably liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

1) set everyone’s Social Security benefits at current levels;

2) set a dividing line for income, such as 30th percentile, 50th, or 67th;

3) everyone below the line gets their benefit check indexed to national wage growth;

4) everyone above the line gets their benefit check indexed to a price index;

5) since wages grow faster than prices, the poorer group would see the purchasing power of its benefits increase over time, while the richer group would have its purchasing power locked in.

And nobody gets less.

There are other solutions. In a report last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York laid out four options, any one of which would make Social Security sustainable:

1) Increase payroll taxes by 6 percentage points.

2) Set the benefit formula one-third lower.

3) Raise the normal retirement age from 67 to 73.

4) Means-test the benefits and cut them by a dollar for every dollar a pensioner earns.

None of these solutions is particularly palatable on its own, but a blend shouldn’t be that hard to swallow.

Romney has proposed a mix of progressive pricing and a gradual increase of a couple of years in the retirement age. He said that would be enough to solve the problem. We haven’t seen numbers to support that, but it would clearly go a long way.

PolitiFact can’t drum up any more for its case that Biden’s claim is Half True than an unsubstantiated assertion that the middle class would “feel the crunch” under progressive price indexing. How is “crunch” even a loosely appropriate description of undiminished purchasing power?

PolitiFact’s bottom line: “It’s clear that Romney’s approach of raising the retirement age and re-jiggering inflation indexing without raising taxes will lead to benefit cuts over time. That’s the point.”

No, the point is slowing the growth in the cost of benefits by tying them more closely to cost of living. That’s hardly “massive cuts in Social Security,” as Biden put it.

The sad thing is that the claim PolitiFact checked was nowhere near Biden’s most outrageous statement of the day.

Here are a few quotes from his speech in Green Bay:

“Let’s measure what (Ryan) and Gov. Romney want to do for those who cannot defend or care for themselves … massive cuts in Medicaid, throwing 19 million people off health care, including a million seniors and several million children. By the way, I’m not making this stuff up. Massive cuts in Medicare …. ”

The Ryan plan “will give seniors a stipend, a voucher worth less than their Medicare costs now. Then it’s going to say to them, ‘You go out there and shop for the best insurance you can buy with this voucher.’ That’s what it is. If it weren’t so serious, you’d think I was making it up.”

“They are for massive cuts in Social Security for future generations, massive cuts in education, eliminating tax credits to send your kids to college, Pell grants they cut by an average of $1,000 for 9 million working-class kids….”

Biden needs to get his subconscious to stop butting in and drawing attention to the stuff he’s making up.

First, his Medicaid claim.

We’re guessing Biden reads The Washington Post, whose liberal health policy blog recently used that figure of 19 million, citing a study by the liberal Urban Institute. The Urban Institute uses intentionally shocking figures and questionable terminology (71 percent of adults and children could be cut from Medicaid!) to describe what a block-grant program and the repeal of Obamacare would do, and it’s not what it first appears to be.

If you examine the study closely, it doesn’t even support the smaller figure Biden uses for his claim. The 19 million figure refers to new enrollments that may need to be financed at the state level instead of the federal — not to throwing people off a plan they already have.

And those massive cuts to Medicaid? That’s the new way for progressives to describe the repeal of Obamacare, which would add $642 billion to Medicaid costs over the decade.

The “massive cuts to Medicare” are the same size as the $711 billion in Medicare cuts already created by Obamacare. If the fact-checkers jumped all over Ryan at the Republican National Convention for his criticism of the cuts, they should treat Biden the same way. On this point, neither man is lying, but both are insincere.

Then there’s Biden’s claim that the Ryan plan “will give seniors a stipend, a voucher worth less than their Medicare costs now. Then it’s going to say to them, ‘You go out there and shop for the best insurance you can buy with this voucher.’”

This is wrong, too.

Here’s Dr. Aaron E. Carroll’s description of Ryan’s plan for CNN:

“Each year, companies will submit bids for how much it will cost to provide insurance for a senior that year. The voucher would then be set at the price of the second-lowest bid. In other words, seniors could get the second-cheapest plan for very little. If they chose the cheapest plan, they would actually get a rebate. If they want anything more expensive, they would have to pay for the difference.”

That guarantees at least one free insurance policy option. Of course, the bids don’t exist yet, and the Congressional Budget Office hasn’t drawn up any estimates of how much the vouchers would be worth, so Biden’s guess about one’s value is empty, but savings is a good thing.

Then there are the “massive cuts in education.” Somebody buy Biden a thesaurus, one with a massive amount of synonyms. These cuts include, he said, “eliminating tax credits to send your kids to college. Pell grants they cut by an average of $1,000 for nine million working class kids….”

Was his source for the Pell grant claim this tweet by Eva Longoria? Actually, Longoria, was just tweeting a link to President Obama’s campaign page.

The claims about education do have a little more basis.

The origin of the $1,000 cut claim is simple. Ryan has called for a 14.3 percent across-the-board cut in discretionary spending in the federal budget. If applied evenly to Pell grants, it would add up to around $1,000 per grant. But Ryan’s budget calls for reducing the eligibility of wealthier students, not reducing aid evenly for everyone. The overall cost of Pell grants has more than doubled in the past five years, through expansion of eligibility and enrollment, and a $900 increase in the maximum award.

The other claim, that Romney would eliminate education tax credits, is speculative.

The 2009 stimulus package temporarily expanded education tax credits from $7.6 billion to $10.8 billion, according to PolitiFact. Romney supported a one-year extension on the tax credit earlier this year, but the Tax Policy Center speculates that if Romney is elected, he’ll let this American Opportunity Tax Credit lapse, reverting to the earlier program, called Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally.

It’s a reasonable guess, but here’s how PolitiFact describes it:

“According to the (Tax Policy Center), Romney’s economic advisers say that the American Opportunity Tax Credit (AOTC) would be reverted back to the Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally (HOPE) tax credit if Romney is elected president this year.”

“If Romney were elected, however, he would allow it to lapse as scheduled under current law.”

“… even though Romney would allow the credit to expire, that doesn’t mean all tax deductions for college students would be lost.”

“Romney’s campaign has said that the former Massachusetts governor will not renew the American Opportunity Tax Credit if he is elected in November.”

The source for all those definite assertions about what Romney would do? It’s this modest sentence in the Tax Policy Center report: “Based on the campaign’s summary and Gov. Romney’s statements, TPC assumes that the 2001-03 tax cuts become permanent but that temporary tax cuts enacted in 2009 and 2010 are allowed to expire.”

With Biden spilling this much nonsense at just one campaign stop, we should expect the Democrats to start racking up some Pants on Fire rulings from PolitiFact any day now. Any day.

Contact Jon Cassidy at jon@ohiowatchdog.org