Mainstream media has plenty of flaws, but for me the worst one is that the requirement to reach a relatively wide audience begs of the medium a complete lack of context. For example, this article on Ben Bernanke, the new Fed chairman…

Congress should address the growing cost of entitlement programs in the federal budget to assure financial markets and give people time to adjust and plan their retirement, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Thursday…

“It’s important to get that going soon, first of all to assure financial markets that Congress will be responsible and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, to give people the time they need to plan for retirement and make provisions based on any changes that you might decide to make,” Bernanke told the U.S. Senate Banking Committee in his first appearance before that chamber as Fed chief.

“The widening deficits over a period of years will reduce national savings, will probably exacerbate the current account deficit, may raise interest rates and will probably inhibit the dynamism of the economy,” he said.

Hooooo boy….let’s break this down, in reverse for the hell of it:

The national savings rate is already statistically ZERO — or BELOW according to some measurements. On average, when we pay for everything we get there is no money left, we dip into debt. This isn’t because of a recent shift, but because a long time ago the decision was made to emphasize (read: promote via government intervention) consumption. Chunks of industry were rampantly subsidized, policies were drawn up w/ the intent of making deliberate debt OK, & — here’s the key — the value of our money was changed from being at least partially backed up by gold to being backed up by….nothing. Thus, whenever the government felt like we weren’t spending money quick enough, they fired up the printing presses, stuffing the economy with “liquidity”.

Retirement planning? With what? People have been coming up with the thought in their head that saving is a handicap to having a comfortable life, if enough people had broken this cycle then we wouldn’t even be discussing entitlements, most wouldn’t be getting them anyway.

There’s the rub: the popular culture has been indoctrinated for decades to believe that what they did didn’t matter, they could always spend more, & in the end Big Brother would take care of them. Is it any wonder that such folks — even the ones that rant rhetorically about “big government” — vote for whoever promises them the largest free lunch? They outleap their wallet frequently, as they’ve been trained to do.