Fast Takes: How not to save Social Security, propagandists run Wikipedia and more commentary

New figures show the Social Security trust fund could “be exhausted” by 2032, reports Andrew G.Biggs at National Review, but the plan from Sens.

Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D- Mass.) to save it by “eliminating the payroll tax cap” would make the problem worse.It would “create massive incentives to shift compensation to non-taxable” income, “reduce economic growth and, with it, [tax] revenues” and prompt employers to slash wages, cutting revenue further.Plus, it would increase benefits, defeating the supposed purpose.

“What Social Security reform desperately needs” is planners who “understand the purpose of a social insurance program — namely, to protect poor seniors, survivors, and the disabled,” and not to replace “what households and private markets can better provide on their own.”“Not even a co-founder” of Wikipedia “can edit it if he is attempting to implement his program of reform,” fumes Larry Sanger at the Washington Examiner, after finding that “a relatively small clique of anonymous administrators” can ban users who counter the site’s “propagandist bent.”It’s grabbed “the attention of the global internet”: “Powerful admins routinely gang up on people who don’t fall in line,” running a “dictatorship of the twee.” “Special-interest Wikipedia editorial groups” run “offline discussion groups,” some funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, to “edit articles of keen interest to progressives” with cash coming from “the state of Qatar, the Gates Foundation, and Libya’s sovereign wealth fund.” The term “gun violence” has grown “so common it’s easy to miss how strained it is,” removing the “the actual person doing the violence” to absurdly suggest that “guns are committing the violence,” warns John McWhorter at The New York Times.This “lexical politesse” “obscures the vivid picture of something horrible that happens disproportionately in black comm...