Remember Bush's last most urgent crisis facing our country? Social Security

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/6822964/the_fake_crisis/

To hear George Bush tell it, Social Security is about to go broke. Since his re-election, the president has launched a full-scale campaign to convince the public that the retirement system will run out of money starting in 2018. "The system goes into the red," Bush told reporters on December 20th at a rare press conference. "Many times, legislative bodies will not react unless the crisis is apparent, crisis is upon them. I believe that crisis is." Social Security, he concluded, "can't sustain that which has been promised to the workers."

To save Social Security, Bush wants to destroy it -- replacing government-guaranteed retirement benefits with private accounts that will be subject to the whims of the stock market. It's an expensive plan. Allowing workers to divert even a small portion of their payroll taxes into private investments, as Bush is proposing, would require the government to borrow at least $2 trillion to make up the immediate shortfall. It's also completely unnecessary, according to Paul Krugman, a prize-winning professor of economics at Princeton University. In a blistering series of columns in the New York Times, Krugman has marshaled the economic data to show that Social Security is not only solvent, it's in much better financial shape than the rest of the federal government. "The people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary weapons," Krugman wrote recently, "are now trying another bum's rush."

At his tree-shaded home in Princeton, New Jersey, Krugman took a break from working on a new economics textbook to explain why the crisis is phony -- and what's wrong with Bush's plan "to convert Social Security into a giant 401(k)."

[paparush]

1. That's Pure PNAC Doctrine - To Save Something, You Must Destroy It

[Richard Steele]

2. Yeah, a fake crisis just as URGENT as his "immigration crisis" is today.

Priorities, priorities...
weren't there some OTHER things going on
back when he was touring the country
blathering about Social Security?

[mcscajun]

3. Krugman's been right on this for quite some time, as the article

as the article indicates.

When this was Bush's "hot topic" of the season, I followed Krugman's columns faithfully, squirreling away fact after fact to counter the BushCo hype machine's workings among those I know.

This paragraph at the end of article gave me a twinge:

The right says that what we need is more choice, more competition. But every piece of evidence suggests that health care is an area in which privatization actually raises costs. If they succeed at dismantling both Social Security and Medicare, then you're pretty much back, on domestic policy, to the days of Warren Harding -- which is exactly where they want to go.

Warren Harding, the one President you can compare Bush to, right down the line. Figures.
http://www.alternet.org/story/11181

[grasswire]

4. and remember the Stem Cell summer?

All the hype that went into George's consideration of that urgent problem? (And then at the end of that "focused" summer, two planes flew into the WTC)