Josh Marshall writes about SocSec again, using Bush's statement Tuesday that most young people don't think they'll ever get a dime from Social Security as a springboard. He puts himself in the category of the "young people," which seems fair (he says he's 35) from my advanced age.
According to relatively pessimistic forecasts, two government agencies -- one of which is part of a Republican administration and the other under the oversight of a Republican congress -- say I'll get my full benefits for either the first five years of my retirement [2037 - 2042] or the first fifteen years [2037 - 2052]. After that, if nothing changes at all, I'll probably keep drawing three-quarters of my benefits. And even if I'm only drawing that three-quarters it'll still be more than today's retirees draw even in inflation-adjusted dollars.This disconnect suggests one of three possibilities.
One is that the president has been briefed on certain highly classified budget projections which show a far more dire situation than the government's non-classified budgeting estimates would have us believe. We'll call this the secret evidence hypothesis.
Another possibility is that President Bush believes that the US government will default on the Treasury notes held by the Social Security Administration. Let's call this the Harken Energy hypothesis.
If it's neither of these we can only conclude that as he has done repeatedly before, this president is deceiving the people he has sworn to serve and defend in order to achieve a policy goal he cannot manage by honest means.
And, speaking of the President, Josh goes on: "just as he and his associates did during the build up to the Iraq war, he uses paraphrases, work-arounds and slippery repetitons to communicate the intended falsehood while still providing himself with sufficient wiggle room to evade being tagged as a liar."
Well, I'm not a member of the White House Press Corps, I'm just a lonely blogging voice, and I'll call the President a liar. He and his entire PR machine are liars. What's worse, they know they're lying, just as they did when they scared the American public about Saddam and his ostensible WMD (now shown not to be there). They are the most untrustworthy group of individuals that has ever taken hold of power in this country.
Posted by Linkmeister at January 13, 2005 12:01 AM