Ellen Schultz has given us a fascinating account of the ways in which corporate America has been able to game legal and accounting rules to emasculate the private pension system. It was only a few decades ago that a secure pension was a staple of middle class life. Workers in middle class jobs, whether in offices, construction, or manufacturing expected to have a pension in retirement to supplement their Social Security income. In many cases, the pension would provide the larger portion of their income, with the Social Security benefit being the supplement.

So there I was, surfing around the intertoobz this morning when I came across this headline at CNN: “Stop vilifying venture capitalists.”

I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback at the headline as it surely did not reflect anything I had read.

The Washington Post continued its jounalistic malpractice against Social Security by misrepresenting the Trust Fund and portraying the program as in crisis. That brought a well deserved rebuke from prominent economists and other, but WaPo’s clueless reporter is still in denial.

Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair.

The White House wants you to believe that the American Jobs Act is loaded up with bipartisan solutions once preferred by Republicans. And to some extent, that’s true. But there are a number of Easter eggs in here, policy ideas that originated with liberal policy groups. The White House may be touting the bipartisan bona fides on the top line. They may have frozen out the liberal policy shops for years. But when the time comes to save their bacon with jobs programs, they come back to the liberal wonks.

I naively thought Obama’s offering to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would put an end to the “liberals are being unfair to Obama” genre, but Jonathan Chait (heh-indeeded by John Cole) published another one in the New York Times magazine today.

It’s full of problems, but I want to focus on this one — because it’s so obviously wrong.

The Obama Administration has finally started to do something relatively serious about the housing crisis by using the tool of executive authority it has over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Unfortunately, the plan seems to depend heavily on enriching large corporate middlemen.

If you read the first two thirds of her article, you’d logically conclude that unless we can find a replacement for the rapidly fading federal stimulus, there isn’t anything on the horizon to raise GDP growth and boost employment.

Those who are actually concerned about foreign holdings of U.S. government debt should know that it depends on the trade deficit, not the budget deficit. This is all simple econ 101. It means that the jingoistic budget hawks are yapping about the wrong deficit. The recipe for correcting the trade deficit (more econ 101) is lowering the value of the dollar against other currencies.

Usually it is the politicians who use euphemisms to try to conceal the impact of their policies. However, the Washington Post decided to help them along in a front page article when it twice referred to Social Security “changes” that could be part of the budget agreement.

Of course “changes” don’t reduce the deficit unless they are cuts. President Obama and the congressional leadership were discussing plans to cut Social Security. These cuts are likely to be very unpopular, so it is likely that they would rather have the public not realize that they were debating cuts to Social Security.