George...did you chop down that cherry tree?

[Dees]

Lies and more lies. Seriously, how do you expect to lead a country when every word out of your mouth is a lie.

From Molly Ivins....1/6/05

Actually, the passage of time is not required for proof – look around. The Bushies are about to launch a $50 million to $100 million dollar propaganda campaign to convince us the Social Security system is in crisis. Actually, it's not. It's quite robust and has astonishingly low administrative costs, less than 1 percent.

According to President Bush's own Commission to "Strengthen Social Security," the administrative costs of keeping track of private accounts will be 10 to 30 times the cost of administering the current system.

The Social Security System is in no danger whatsoever of going broke, or even of having to pay out less than full compensation for at least 50 years. There are any number of statistical models and premises one can argue about here, but when the administration begins with a premise that requires fixing Social Security based on an extrapolation to infinity, you know you are not dealing with people who argue in good faith.

Even if Social Security were in full-fledged crisis, none of the sensible, cheap, effective ways to fix it would involve the massive trillion-dollar boondoggle this administration contemplates.

Let's get this straight. The Republicans do not want to fix Social Security, they want to kill it. Period. They don't want to "partially privatize" Social Security, they want to end it. What they want is a private pension system like the one their pointy-headed heroes at the University of Chicago dreamed up for Chile, the poster child of why we should not do this.

This same rigid, inflexible, impractical the-market-is-always-best ideology is like a form of mania with these folks. As Paul Krugman patiently points out, "Claims that stocks will always yield high, low-risk returns are just bad economics."

In fact, it's more than passingly reminiscent of another rigid, inflexible, politico-economic orthodoxy: communism. And just as capable of robustly ignoring reality.

And for robustly ignoring reality, you can't hardly beat spending $50 million to $100 million on a propaganda campaign to convince America there's something seriously wrong with Social Security while you ignore the collapse of the American health care system. It is common to begin all discussions of American health care with a complete lie, uttered in this example by President Bush: "We live in a great country that has got the best health care system in the world, and we need to keep it that way."

The peerless investigative team of Donald Bartlett and James Steele reports in their new book, "Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business – and Bad Medicine," one of our most enduring myths is that we have "world class health care."

"To be sure, it does offer the very best of care to some folks," they write. "It does offer world-class high-tech surgery and some space-age medical procedures. But these benefit 2 or 3 percent of the population at most, along with the richest citizens of other countries who come here for the highly specialized treatment. ... Many countries around the world take far better care of their people, achieve better results for their health care system and do it all with far fewer dollars. ... The statistics are even grimmer when life span is counted in years of healthy living. ... By this measure, the United States in 2002 ranked a distant 29th among the countries of the world, between Slovenia and Portugal."

[flordehinojos]

1. since getting rid of social security as we know it is a blow to america's

retired citizenry which hits it fulls force ...can anyone explain to me what benefit does his majesty bush derive from it? In other words, I don't understand what in blazes there is for bush to benefit from by blowing our retirement system out of the planet, other than just perhaps a repeat of that sick pleasure he got from sticking firecrackers on to defenseless frogs and blowing them up--how this man never ended up in a State's Mental Health Institution just gets me. Lots of little kids here and there in this country have been locked up for doing just that and a little more.

[meti57b]

2. Their idea is to completely bankrupt the federal government, so that ....

it will be politically possible, acceptable and necessary to eliminate all "social programs". In the future, the federal government will have no money for anything other than war, a bare-bones federal government, enforcement of the PATRIOT ACTs and faith-based funding. Now, that looks like I intended it as a joke, but I didn't.

The following is from a leaked whitehouse memo, written by Karl Rove's deputy, Peter H. Wehner.

"For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win -- and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country."

They are admitting their proposed changes to Social Security have nothing to do with fiscal soundness of the program or providing future benefits. It's pretty obvious from that statement that their entire effort is to phase out Social Security. Note, that they will be advertising their privatization plan with $50-$100 million.

[NMDemDist2]

3. it's also a payoff to Wall Street

all that lovely new capitol to churn ( churn ( P ) Pronunciation Key (chûrn)n.--#3 To buy and sell (a client's securities) frequently, especially in order to generate commissions )