Why put off tomorrow's debt when you can have it today?

I wrote before that the Bush plan on Social Security simply speeds up the projected debt due from forty or fifty years down the road to a mere two or three, and that is being viewd by the administration as "fiscally responsible." Paul Krugman points out that this is just the tip of the Bush iceburg:

Advocates of privatization almost always pretend that all we have to do is borrow a bit of money up front, and then the system will become self-sustaining. The Wehner memo talks of borrowing $1 trillion to $2 trillion "to cover transition costs." Similar numbers have been widely reported in the news media.

But that's just the borrowing over the next decade. Privatization would cost an additional $3 trillion in its second decade, $5 trillion in the decade after that and another $5 trillion in the decade after that. By the time privatization started to save money, if it ever did, the federal government would have run up around $15 trillion in extra debt.

These numbers are based on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of Plan 2, which was devised by a special presidential commission in 2001 and is widely expected to be the basis for President Bush's plan.

Krugman continues:

Add borrowing for privatization to the mix, and the budget deficit might well exceed 8 percent of G.D.P. at some time during the next decade. That's a deficit that would make Carlos Menem's Argentina look like a model of responsibility. It would be sure to cause a collapse of investor confidence, sending the dollar through the floor, interest rates through the roof and the economy into a tailspin.

And when investors started fleeing because they believed that America had turned into a banana republic, they wouldn't be reassured by claims that someday, in the distant future, privatization would do great things for the budget. Just ask the Argentines: their version of Social Security privatization was also supposed to save money in the long run, but all it did was move forward the date of their crisis.

Some have been saying that denying there is an impending crisis is not a winning strategy in the battle for Social Security. I wonder, however, if that message was coupled with the fact that there are other, more pressing issues to be amended. Maybe even propose some bills that take care of these more looming issues. If Bush wants to focus on a problem that is years down the road, that's fine. But there are other, more pressing issues that he wants to ignore in the meantime by creating even more problems in the future.