New York Times' Peterson Story Spells Our Name Right, Gets An Opinion Wrong, Corrects What's Already Correct

By Richard Eskow

Created 04/13/2011 - 11:14pm

This weekend the New York Times ran what seemed to be a somewhat overly flattering piece [1] about right-wing anti-entitlement hawk Pete Peterson, and the piece included this paragraph:

Progressives like Mr. Baker or Richard Eskow of the Campaign for America’s Future often paint Mr. Peterson as a disingenuous tycoon who made his fortune from the low carried-interest tax rate (it allows hedge-fund operators to shield earnings from the government). They argue that Social Security’s trust fund — while supplied with Treasury bonds, not dollar bills — will nonetheless stay solvent for decades, and accuse Mr. Peterson of shrewdly couching entitlement reform as a way to protect future generations when, in fact, it is today’s elderly who will suffer.

That would be Dean Baker, prominent economist, who describes Peterson with considerable accuracy:

"“He’s not focused on the debt so much as on cutting Social Security and Medicare,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Even in the late ’90s, when we had a surplus, he was saying the same thing and the debt wasn’t in any obvious way a problem then.”