Realizing that if this were some sort of competition for a “dumbest headline” award, there are plenty of contenders out there every week. But an offering from NPR on Sunday would certainly have to be a candidate. As part of the ongoing coverage of the debate over raising the debt limit and proposed spending cuts, Dominico Montanaro of NPR asked the following question. “Republicans say they won’t cut Social Security. So why does it keep coming up?” This was asked despite the fact that Speaker McCarthy already explicitly said that cuts to that program or Medicare were “off the table.” But I think we can come up with the actual answer to Montanaro’s question without putting in too much legwork.

There are reasons why the narrative that Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare sticks. Look at recent history — President George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s budget proposed sweeping changes to Medicare, and even though former President Trump largely tabled serious talk of entitlement cuts, his budget did call for cuts to some aspects of Social Security and Medicaid.

“When I pointed out that some Republicans are talking about eliminating Medicare, they said, ‘No, no, no,’ ” Biden said in an interview on PBS NewsHour the day after the State of the Union address. “I said, ‘Oh, OK. That means all of you are for supporting Medicare? Everybody raise your hand.’ They all raised their hand. So guess what? We accomplished something.

It’s first worth pointing out that NPR’s Montanaro clearly knew that the idea was off the table. We know that from two facts. First, and most glaringly, if you look at the original title of the article embedded in the URL, it read “GOP says Medicare, Social Security Not on the Table in Debt Ceiling Talks.” Further, if you read down further in the article, Montanaro himself wrote, “McCarthy said cuts to the programs are off the table. But…”

Yes, there’s always a “but,” isn’t there? In this case, however, there truly is no “there” there. Entitlement reform is badly needed of course, but those two programs remain the third rail of American politics and even the most vocal and raucous members of the Freedom Caucus aren’t politically suicidal enough to pull that lever.

Pretty much the only Republican saying this is Rick Scott, as Montanaro also admits. And he has already been thrown under the bus by both McCarthy and Mitch McConnell. Scott also quickly tried to walk back the idea, saying that he had been “mischaracterized.”

So let’s get back to the title question, shall we? Why does talk about Republicans wanting to cut or eliminate Social Security keep coming up? Because Democrats and liberals in the media, including NPR, keep bringing it up. That’s why. It’s a tried and true page out of the progressive playbook intended to try to scare senior citizens away from voting for Republicans. Joe Biden has already tried it a couple of times this year. While not directly accusing the GOP of having such a plan, he made sure to ask them about it.

This discussion has nothing to do with actual entitlement reform or the debt ceiling. It’s pure, cynical politics. But the problem is that there will still be people out there living in a lower information zone who will see headlines like this one and have the idea in the back of their minds when they go to vote.