The Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz

I have never really had the stomach for the State Of The Union speech. I say this in a non-partisan tone. It bores the shit out of me, and always has. It's a laundry list of empty promises, an endless litany of pallid bromides. Worst, because of the innumerable applause breaks, it's hard to establish a rhythm that the listener can get comfortable with.

As the lovely and talented Craig from The Crazy Years points out, it is merely a theatrical exercise in which elected millionaires talk to each other in coded phrases on the stage, we the audience applaud at all the pomp and secret handshakes from our perspectives in the cheap seats, and the media function as a Greek chorus, telling us how to feel about particular parts of the "grand slam" Dear Leader supposedly knocked out of the park.

Really, it's all I can do anymore to just read the script....uh, I mean transcript.

So basically what you have here is more of the same from these guys -- completely ignoring the real problems that face this country, while trying to gin up fear and controversy over that which is not terribly scary nor controversial. Consider the following paragraph from the Social Security section of the speech:

So here is the result: Thirteen years from now, in 2018, Social Security will be paying out more than it takes in. And every year afterward will bring a new shortfall, bigger than the year before. For example, in the year 2027, the government will somehow have to come up with an extra $200 billion to keep the system afloat - and by 2033, the annual shortfall would be more than $300 billion. By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt.

God, there is so much here that is fundamentally dishonest and unsound, it would take until somewhere around 2018 to enumerate it. First of all, these projections assume that 2018 will be like 2005. Take a quick second, and ponder just how different things are now than they were in 1992. So the house not only is not on fire, that might not even be a book of matches sitting there.

Secondly, notice that nowhere does Bush address the transition costs, which, pro-rated over the next ten years, figure to cost around $150-200 billion per year. That's right away, not in 2027 or 2033. Now. How do we finance an extra $200 billion per year and fund a military action with no definite timetable, while we're half a trillion in the hole to begin with? Apparently we just won't count it in the deficit projections, as with the war spending. Shudder to think just how much the deficit would be if they counted everything. And we don't even need to touch on how foolish it is to make ourselves even more vulnerable economically in the face of an ever-declining dollar and a hugely ascendant Chinese creditor. It's absolutely insane to think of adding another $200 bn/year for anything, much less something we don't really need in the first place. Something simply has to give. You want a crisis to solve? There ya go.

(Oh, and by the way, Harvard, the government "keeps afloat" the way it always has -- selling bonds. That's how we "keep afloat" right now, $450 billion in the hole. We sold the Chinese and Japanese (and British and French) a bunch of IOU's. Senatorial halfwit Wayne Allard recently alluded that we might default on SS if we had to. Sorry, Wayne-O. That's not the way it works. We do that and all the foreign investors and bond holders pull out, all at once, and we are royally screwed. Now go back to sleep and let the adults figure this one out.)

So he's already dealing from false premises here, ignoring these facts and talking up things like price indexing, which would reduce benefits by over 40% in the long run. Why not just remove the income cap? How about means testing? Raise the payroll tax half a point, the retirement age one year? There are so many fine-tuning adjustments that can be made before overhauling the whole thing, especially when we have so many irons in the fire. Why right now?

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Basically, worrying this much about Social Security's future insolvency at this point in time is roughly akin to driving across Kansas, and stomping on the brakes every mile or so because the Grand Canyon is somewhere up ahead. It is somewhere up ahead, but not for quite some distance, and in the meantime, the drive is needlessly being made extremely unpleasant. And when you start getting close to the canyon, you can just apply the brakes like a normal person.

Here's the thing -- Bush knows we're in Kansas. He also knows this is probably the last best chance to mess with Social Security, with a supposedly complaisant Republican Congress. This is nothing but another public subsidy/private profit wealth transfer, period.

Thankfully, unlike the Iraq War Which Was To Protect Ourselves From A Grave And Gathering Threat But Now Is Really To Make People More Freer, even the Republicans in Congress are refusing to just rubber-stamp this nonsense. They could lie to themselves about Iraq; this is quite another matter. There is simply no reason, and no upside.

But Bush is nothing if not bold and relentless. It is irrelevant at this point whether he even still believes in this shit or not -- though even he must be wondering about the constant changes in marketing terms and focus-group data by now. Now it's "voluntary personal retirement accounts". Last week it was "personal accounts"; at the beginning of the year it was "private accounts". By Memorial Day it'll be "Super Happy Fun Sex Bonus Accounts With A Cherry On Top".

So. He's already begun his barnstorming tour of hand-picked amen crowds. (God forbid he should ever have to have an honest conversation with someone who doesn't agree with him.) Are we stupid enough to buy into this pre-packaged bullshit?