Get Your Blog Up

“This administration is populated by people who’ve spent their careers bashing government. They’re not just small-government conservatives—they’re Grover Norquist, strangle-it-in-the-bathtub conservatives. It’s a cognitive disconnect for them to be able to do something well in an arena that they have so derided and reviled all these years.”

Senator Hillary Clinton

Monday, February 28, 2005

Bush should debate Bush?

Bloomberg:
During a Feb. 4 speech in Tampa, Florida, President George W. Bush pointed to a chart showing the Social Security system running out of money by 2042.

"What are you going to do about that chart?" he urged the crowd to ask their senators and representatives.

What Bush didn't tell his audience was that if the forecast is correct, the U.S. will have its worst economic performance since the Great Depression. He also didn't say that his own White House economists disagree with some of the basic assumptions of the chart, which was drawn up by the Social Security Administration.

The experts who advise the agency, which reports to the president, have underestimated U.S. economic growth for seven of the last eight years; they have also underestimated worker productivity. Using projections from Bush's Office of Management and Budget, Social Security's trust fund would have cash for years beyond 2042.

Nice to see some honesty in the debate on Social Security for a change.