You Can't See Bias Through Biased Eyes

I once watched an episode of ER where a small child had been shot while playing with his mother’s gun. At the end of the episode, the child’s mother tells the doctor that she doesn’t know how to thank him for saving her son. He replies, "Get rid of the gun."

My thoughts exactly. An obvious bit of commonsense for anyone with young children. But the next day, a talk radio caller complained about the anti-gun message being pushed on ER the night before. And it suddenly hit me as to why some people see media bias so clearly where others see none.

One person’s truth is another person’s slant. To someone like me, who has no agenda whatsoever where guns are concerned, the doctor’s prescription was as innocuous as suggesting a couple of aspirin. But to someone who holds their second amendment rights dear, the advice was another example of media bias against guns.

I saw another example recently on Fox’s The O.C.. Set in California’s ritzy, Republican enclave of Orange County, everyone is rich, conniving and self-absorbed. Except for the Cohen’s, who are rich, thoughtful and benevolent. And the show’s writers have seen to it that we know that they are Democrats.

Now to those on the left, that may not appear to be bias. They have one common stereotype of the wealthy – that unless they are liberal, they must have made their fortune by lying, cheating and stealing at the expense of the little guy. To them, portraying the wealthy that way isn’t bias, it’s reality. Unfortunately, those images have been reinforced so endlessly in the movies and on TV, that they have become the conventional wisdom among much of the general public.

That is a shame, because in my experience I have yet to meet a wealthy scoundrel. Almost without exception, every successful person I know has gotten there through honest, hard work – with equal emphasis on honest and hard. Nothing more and nothing less. But you’d never know it from the movies.

Still, bias isn’t always the result of the writer or producer’s unknowing world view. Oftentimes, especially in the news media, the reasons are a bit more calculated.

TV news is especially suspect. While they claim impartiality, like everyone else they live and die with ratings. Therefore, anytime they can tell a story from an underdog’s point of view, they will.

Take the reporting on the silicone breast implant issue a few years ago. No major study was able to definitively link implants to any of the diseases women were suffering. And the media knew it.
Yet, rather than reporting the facts as they were, they chose to play up the suffering women, who were a far more compelling story. They would have them tell their tearful stories, interspersed with shots of the huge corporate complex and middle-aged executives denying responsibility. An incredibly damaging juxtaposition. No matter that Dow Corning was unjustifiably forced into bankruptcy, costing people jobs and investors billions. The women made for good TV.

So when someone says there is no bias in the media, they are wrong. It exists in both news and entertainment. If we can’t see it, it’s because we are viewing it from our own biased perspective. Just as you can’t see the color red through rose-colored glasses, you can’t see bias through biased eyes.

What's a Billion Dollars to You?

What’s a billion dollars? Well, for most of us it’s a whole bunch of money. For others, like congressmen and senators, it’s a scrap that they treat like the loose change rattling around in my sofa. They talk about a billion for this program, ten billion for that, as if they are doling out quarters to the kids for the gumball machine.

Well, here’s another way to think of a billion dollars – it’s the equivalent of about $3.50 for every man, woman and child in the United States. Or fourteen dollars for a family of four (you can do the math – a billion divided by 280 million people). All of a sudden, a billion here, ten billion there means $14 here, $140 there for good old mom and dad. Pretty soon, you’re talking about real money. Our money.

So that means that the typical family of four will pay $5,586 this year to support our military. The House version of the proposed highway spending bill will cost about $875 annually. And we’ll pay $805 for the U.S. Department of Education.

Now that last one’s a real kicker when put into perspective. With a combined population of 78,000, West Chester and Liberty townships will send about $16 million to Washington to fund the Department of Education, but will only get back a little more than $1 million for Lakota Schools. We could have foregone the entire levy mess had we simply kept that money at home. But heaven forbid anyone suggest cutting out the Department of Education.

But if you really want a shock, look at healthcare. This year we’ll spend almost $1.7 trillion – that’s trillion with a ‘t’ – as a nation on everything from aspirin to Zoloft. That works out to a little more than $6,000 per person each year. And you wonder why health insurance costs are going up?

We’ve got a drug for everything. High cholesterol? There’s Lipitor. Heartburn? How about some Nexium? Heck, we’ll spend nearly a billion and a half dollars, or about five dollars per person, just on Viagra this year. Combined, these three drugs will cost the average American about forty dollars, or $160 per family, this year alone. And not one of them existed ten years ago.

Now I can already hear some of you saying, "But I don’t take Viagra." It doesn’t matter. We all pay one way or another through higher insurance premiums.

And the same holds true for government expenditures. We may like to think that corporations and the wealthy pay a heftier portion of taxes than we do, but trust me, we all pay. When corporate taxes or gasoline taxes or user fees go up, those costs are passed on to us in the form of higher prices, lower wages or lost jobs.

When the wealthy get taxed we lose out on their investment in the economy, which leaves us all poorer, despite what some would have us believe.

So what can we do? Well, healthcare deserves more space than I can give it here. But when it comes to government spending we must educate ourselves about how our money is being used and how much it costs us personally. And then never let Washington forget that it is our money they are spending, a billion dollars at a time.

Consider The Social Security Opportunity

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan started a firestorm last week when he warned that we face financial and economic calamity lest we cut future benefits for Social Security and Medicare. Immediately, politicians – especially from the left – began referring to the suggestion as outrageous, or worse.

Therein lies the reason that anyone under the age of forty-five who expects to see any type of Social Security payment is nuts. For there are three things certain regarding Social Security – we need to take drastic action to save it, we need to start taking that action now, and the politicians in charge will do neither.

But before we crucify Greenspan and anyone else who seems remotely intrigued by his suggestion, let’s look at the situation for the challenge and opportunity it is.

First, we know that the baby boomers – the oldest of whom are nearing sixty – will soon become a huge liability on the Social Security books. We also know that there are countless deficit demagogues who decry the fact that we are financing our lifestyle today by mortgaging our children’s future.

But that is precisely how Social Security was designed. It’s a pay-as-you go system that promises that if we pay for today’s retirees, then our children will pay for us when our time comes. The only problem is that the boomers will be passing through the system like a rodent passes through a snake – one big mass, with little following behind.

In other words, there will be more people collecting and fewer people paying. So the only solutions are to cut benefits, raise taxes or both. Those on the receiving end don’t want benefits cut because they feel entitled to them since they paid into the system their entire lives. But taxing the next generation isn’t fair either. It’s not their fault that their grandparents chose to have lots of kids, and their parents chose not to.

But this is where the opportunity comes in. With a little leadership, sacrifice and compromise we might not only save Social Security, but positively transform our society for generations to come.

Suppose we apply the concept of privatized Social Security accounts as a supplement to, rather than as a replacement for, our current system. Maintain current benefits and taxes, but require every worker to put a fixed amount, say three percent of their pay, into an untouchable personal retirement account.

Then when the person begins receiving Social Security, their SS benefit is reduced by an amount determined by the annual return on their personal investment account, say by fifty cents for every dollar the private account earns in a given year. Since the size and earnings of these accounts would be larger the longer people are paying into them, the amount of savings to the system will grow the further into the program we get.

Think of all the benefits – we start to pay for our own retirement now rather than leaving it up to our children, we reduce the burden on the system as we retire, we maintain a basic floor of benefits at the current level and we create an entire society that has an ownership stake in our nation’s economy.

Yes, we’ll have more taken out of our paychecks, but it will remain our money. And if we leave less of a burden for our children, won’t that be the best benefit of all?