The most irritating thing about newspapers is their convention of presenting disagreements on matters of fact as nothing more than differences of opinion. Recently, a city official here resigned because he used the word " niggardly." A Washington Post story reported that the word "means different things to different people." Most of the Washingtonians quoted felt it could be taken as a slur, but others did not. And who is the Post to say which side is right? The same day, another Post story reported that President Clinton's Social Security plan is in trouble; it is widely thought to be a "budgetary sleight-of-hand that actually has the effect of counting twice the money that would have gone into the program anyway." Now, it is either double-counting or it isn't, but the article did not delve into the merits of the accusation. Instead it focused on the fact that "serious questions are surfacing."

The question surfaced, among other places, in an article in last week's TNR by Matthew Miller. For those who missed it, Miller assumes the following scenario: The budget surplus is $150 billion, of which $100 billion comes from the leftover Social Security taxes that weren't used to pay for current benefits. That $100 billion goes into the Social Security trust fund. Then Clinton takes 60 percent of the total budget surplus--$90 billion--and gives it to the trust fund. That means the trust fund gets a total of $190 billion. Since this is more than the total value of the budget surplus, Miller concludes that Clinton's plan "double-counts" and is also a "scam," " legerdemain," and a good dozen other synonyms.

I admit it looks strange. But there's a perfectly decent explanation. Suppose that I loan you a dollar, and you promise to pay me back with interest. The Chait trust fund is now worth one dollar. Then, out of the goodness of your heart, you decide to give me back the same dollar as a gift. Now I am worth two dollars: the dollar I have, plus the dollar you still owe me. Clinton's proposal works the same way. Social Security brings in an extra dollar that it doesn't need this year. It loans the dollar to the rest of the federal budget, and in return the federal government deposits an IOU for one dollar in Social Security's trust fund. (The trust fund is an accounting device to keep track of all the dollars Social Security has loaned out.) Now the extra dollar belongs to the non-Social Security budget, and the government can spend it any way it wants. Clinton proposes giving that dollar- -- 60 cents of that dollar, actually, but let's keep it simple--back to the Social Security trust fund. Then the trust fund takes the dollar and purchases a $1 federal bond from the general public. Hence, it has increased its value by more than the value of the budget surplus.

In case it sounds like I'm trying to pull a fast one, let's ponder those two transactions in turn. The first part simply involves lending the Social Security surplus to the general budget. This resembles double-counting in the sense that the money credited to the trust fund can also be used for other purposes. Yet, while the outcry in the press might make you think that Clinton invented this tactic, every federal budget has done this for decades. Indeed, the very same Republicans who are denouncing Clinton--including self- proclaimed budget hawks such as John Kasich and Pete Domenici--have themselves proposed using the budget surplus, made up largely of Social Security funds, to pay for new tax cuts or private retirement accounts.

The only new element is what Clinton proposes to do with the money after Social Security lends it to the general budget. The general budget gives most of the money right back to the trust fund as a grant, not a loan. The trust fund takes about 15 percent of the money and gives it to an independent board to invest in stock indexes. (This part is also controversial, but I won't get into it right now.) It invests the rest of the money in Treasury bills, thus reducing the national debt. Again, this might appear suspicious--how can you use the same dollar to reduce the national debt and bolster the Social Security trust fund? The answer is that it has the same economic effect as reducing the national debt. Right now there are millions of Americans who own federal bonds--IOUs for money they've lent to Uncle Sam. When the trust fund buys up some of those bonds, the public then can use the money to spend or invest in the private sector. To the extent the money is invested in efficient new productive capacity, it strengthens the economy over the long run. Also, by reducing the debt it owes to the public, the government increases its ability to borrow in the future. The only twist is that Clinton's plan guarantees that the benefits of this saving accrue to Social Security.

If this still strikes you funny, consider an alternative scenario. If Clinton took the Social Security portion of the budget surplus and spent it all on tax credits or child care or wild parties in the Oval Office, the money would still be credited to the trust fund. So, if he instead saves the money for Social Security, shouldn't the trust fund reflect the difference?

One common objection is that bolstering the trust fund cannot work because it accumulates nothing but IOUs. But the debtor on those IOUs is the United States government, the safest credit risk in the history of civilization. And the creditors are future Social Security recipients, who demonstrate roughly the same level of forgiveness toward missed payments as a loan shark from the Gambino family. Anyway, this isn't a reason to oppose Clinton's plan, which boosts the government's capacity to make good on future debts.

But Miller doesn't claim the trust fund won't be there. Instead he argues that Clinton is simply pulling money out of the sky. The "logical extension" of the Clinton plan, he writes, is "to use the same accounting trick to boost the trust fund a few extra trillion and announce that Clinton had put the Social Security problem behind us altogether." He's arguing, in other words, that Clinton's plan would have allowed him to add as much money as he wanted to the trust fund. But this is simply not the case. The most Clinton could have put into the trust fund is twice the surplus. This is a fact, not an opinion.

The president's idea might not be in so much trouble, then, if Congress and the media actually understood it. But, then again, maybe it wouldn't matter. Upon hearing that "niggardly" derives from Middle English and Scandinavian dialects, one offendee shrugged: "Do we really know where the Norwegians got the word?" Yes, maybe they anticipated that, centuries hence, the word " nigger" would become a slur in English and then subsequently become socially unacceptable, so they preemptively sneaked a similar-sounding word into the language. All I know for sure is that serious questions are surfacing.