The White House: A Castle in the Sky

There's an old story about a son who killed both of his parents and then petitioned the state for orphan's benefits. That's a fairly close analogy to Bush's recent tour to generate support for his proposed changes to Social Security.

His pitch goes something like this. The so-called Social Security trust fund is just a mirage. It's made up of nothing but a bunch of government IOU's. It's an accounting gimmick which creates a debt in one account and a surplus in another account, and when you total it all out, it equals zero. (It's too bad Bush wasn't nearly as outspoken condemning the most egregious example of this type of accounting gimmick. Enron special purpose entity "Death Star", anyone?) Therefore, in judging the fiscal soundness of Social Security, we should ignore the trust fund.

Now the fact of the matter is, several years ago, when Congress raised the payroll tax to build up the Social Security trust fund in an attempt to increase the fiscal soundness of Social Security (a tax increase Alan Greenspan testified in favor of), the entire premise of the tax increase was the complete certainty that the assets in the trust fund were not merely an accounting gimmick. To the contrary, raising the payroll tax was explicitly sold on the premise that the assets in the trust fund would be used to shore up the solvency of Social Security. Now, the President sneers at anyone so naive as to believe the "government" would keep its promises to pay an IOU.

So here we have the Bush team's modus operandi: (i) create a crisis (out of thin air, if necessary), (ii) trumpet the crisis while disavowing responsibility, and (iii) insist that extreme measures (going to war, cutting taxes, appointing John Bolton) are needed to solve the crisis

Need more examples? Republicans are shocked, shocked at all the vacancies in the federal judiciary. Of course, during the Clinton years when Republicans were in charge of the Senate and Senator Hatch was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Chief Justice Rehnquist was basically begging the Senate to accelerate the confirmation process, and yet Senate Republicans were convinced that the pared down judiciary was a model of streamlined efficiency and saw no crisis in leaving a significant portion of each federal appeals court empty. Now, these same vacancies constitute a crisis for the country. And as a friend reminded me this weekend, we have always been at war with East Asia.

The frightening question is, what's next? Logic dictates that with an over-extended military, we won't provoke North Korea, Iran, or Syria. But then, as we know from Ron Suskind's article in the NY Times Magazine (Oct. 17, 2004), this administration does not consider itself part of the "reality-based community." Interestingly, neither do psychotics.