Attack on Social Security, continued...

To: The Editor Washington Post December 5 2011

Is it fair to conclude that the Post’s editorial “Extend the Payroll Tax Cut” (4 Dec 11) is a clarification, or even a reversal, of its November 27 effort on the same topic? Any other conclusion would leave readers with hopelessly contradictory messages.
By the way, is it further fair to find the fine hand of Fred Hiatt in the November 27 piece? How else to explain his use of the rather peculiar adjective “sacrosanct” in his oped of December 5 to describe the Social Security trust fund and his worry in the same oped that the payroll tax “giveaway, like so many ‘temporary’ giveaways before it, will turn into “something permanent?” Both the same word and the same thought appear in the editorial of November 27.
Or is Hiatt’s oped of December 5 his objection to the Post’s editorial of December 4 which corrected (Hiatt’s?) editorial of November 27?
Fred Hiatt would do well to examine his vituperative attack on the “middle-class tax-cut bar” and try to explain to his readers why the “middle class” is a wasting asset in the U.S. where it once had reached its fullest flower.

Joseph L. Mayer