Little Black Lies -Krugman

[Rose Siding]

Social Security privatization really is like tax cuts, or the Iraq war: the administration keeps on coming up with new rationales, but the plan remains the same. President Bush's claim that we must privatize Social Security to avert an imminent crisis has evidently fallen flat. So now he's playing the race card.

This week, in a closed meeting with African-Americans, Mr. Bush asserted that Social Security was a bad deal for their race, repeating his earlier claim that "African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people." In other words, blacks don't live long enough to collect their fair share of benefits.

This isn't a new argument; privatizers have been making it for years. But the claim that blacks get a bad deal from Social Security is false. And Mr. Bush's use of that false argument is doubly shameful, because he's exploiting the tragedy of high black mortality for political gain instead of treating it as a problem we should solve.

Let's start with the facts. Mr. Bush's argument goes back at least seven years, to a report issued by the Heritage Foundation - a report so badly misleading that the deputy chief actuary (now the chief actuary) of the Social Security Administration wrote a memo pointing out "major errors in the methodology." That's actuary-speak for "damned lies.".........MORE.........

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/opinion/28krugman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

[Dudley_DUright]

1. One of Krugman's best ever!

:kick:

[wabeewoman]

2. Kick

As usual Krugman nails it.

[NewHampshireDem]

3. * & Co caught in another lie ... the majority of the media and public ...

overlook it or are too stupid to see through it. What would we do without Krugman?

:kick:

[The Zanti Regent]

4. GO PAUL GO!

Here is someone who WILL stand up to the Nazi Party and it's Okrentite apologists at his own paper.

[papau]

5. Excellent! :-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/opinion/28krugman.html

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Little Black Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
.

<snip>Now nobody can expect instant progress in reducing health inequalities. But the benefits of Social Security privatization, if any, won't materialize for many decades. By using blacks' low life expectancy as an argument for privatization, Mr. Bush is in effect taking it as a given that 40 or 50 years from now, large numbers of African-Americans will still be dying before their time.

Is this an example of what Mr. Bush famously called "the soft bigotry of low expectations?" Maybe not: it isn't particularly soft to treat premature black deaths not as a tragedy we must end but as just another way to push your ideological agenda. But bigotry - yes, that sounds like the right word. <snip>

[EC]

6. See how this guy operates

instead of looking at and solving the "tragedy of high black mortality" he just uses it as an excuse to get them on board...what he wasn't counting on is that Blacks know why they have shorter lifespans and have been screaming for decades to have the inequities addressed....He's such an ASS....this is the same thing he is doing with abortion too, instead of fixing the root cause, he just wants to make it illegal, oh, and the war too, instead of going after the root causes of jihads, he just wants to kill...he's got a child's mentality on problems...no cognitive thoughts of starting at the base and working at root causes....