Fear-mongers and other critics of Social Security were silenced — momentarily — by the release last week of the annual trustees' report for the programs. The report showed not only that it's looking pretty good in the near term, but in the long term it's more important to the sustenance of millions of Americans than ever before. But policymakers and pundits have taken the wrong lesson from these findings. The argument they most often put forward is that Social Security is so important it must be "saved," typically by cutting benefits to bring its outflow in line with its income.

You know another storm is brewing when Washington politicians start looking for somebody else to blame for problems they themselves created. That’s what happened recently at a Senate budget hearing when Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus unloaded on Kathleen Sebelius, President Barack Obama’s health and human services secretary. He berated her for failing to adequately educate the public or competently implement the 2,000-plus page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. During the hearing, Baucus worried aloudabout “a huge train wreck coming down” if the Obama administration didn’t clean up its act. Other Democrats soon piled on.

Austerity is a Killer. Estimates put the number of additional suicides at 10,000 and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the U.S. since austerity measures were imposed after the financial collapse of 2008. These findings were highlighted in a new book, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, authored by economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu, and the subject of an interview on Democracy Now!

Immigrants have contributed billions of dollars more to Medicare in recent years than the program has paid out on their behalf, according to a new study, a pattern that goes against the notion that immigrants are a drain on federal health care spending. The study, led by researchers at Harvard Medical School, measured immigrants’ contributions to the part of Medicare that pays for hospital care, a trust fund that accounts for nearly half of the federal program’s revenue. It found that immigrants generated surpluses totaling $115 billion from 2002 to 2009. In comparison, the American-born population incurred a deficit of $28 billion over the same period.

Opponents’ arguments are inconsistent and lack proportion, says Avinash Persaud, former senior executive at JPMorgan and UBS, and an executive fellow at London Business School. The banking industry has launched a concerted and broad attack against the plans of 11 European countries to impose a financial transaction tax. Bankers are complaining that the tax will kill growth, rob pensioners, make the European debt crisis worse, impoverish small farmers and more. On examination, the arguments by opponents of the FTT have three defining features. First, they are inconsistent. We are told that the tax will be so completely avoided that no one will pay it. Then we are told that the tax will bring economic and financial ruin. It is hard to have it both ways.

Less coverage. Considerable maneuvering is underway, as companies seek to achieve the very minimum contributions to employee health plans under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. “Benefit advisers and insurance brokers.... are pitching low-benefit plans across the country,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital visit.”