 American politics gets stranger every week:
Privatizing Social Security on the Backs of the Workers
The NYT's Paul Krugman, who has a background in economics, has added his voice
to the growing chorus of critics of the Bush administration's reckless,
discriminatory, and really stupid economic policies. In an op-ed piece
Borrow, Speculate and Hope, he points out how intellectually and
morally bankrupt the administration's social security privatization
scheme is:
Privatization would begin by
diverting payroll taxes, which pay for current Social Security
benefits, into personal investment accounts. The government, already
deep in deficit, would have to borrow to make up the shortfall. This
would sharply increase the government's debt. Never mind, privatization
advocates say: in the long run, they claim, people would make so much
on personal accounts that the government could save money by cutting retirees' benefits. The government would, in effect, confiscate workers' gains in their personal accounts by cutting those workers' benefits.
There is, by the way, a precedent for Bush-style privatization. One
major reason for Argentina's rapid debt buildup in the 1990's was a
pension reform involving a switch to individual accounts - a switch
that President Carlos Menem, like President Bush, decided to finance
with borrowing rather than taxes. So Mr. Bush intends to emulate a plan
that helped set the stage for Argentina's economic crisis.
If Mr. Bush were to say in plain English that his plan to solve our
fiscal problems is to borrow trillions, put the money into stocks and
hope for the best, everyone would denounce that plan as the height of
irresponsibility. The fact that this plan has an elaborate disguise,
one that would add considerably to its costs, makes it worse.
More Bush Star Wars Nonsense
Also in the NYT, Douglas Jehl describes
the new secret spy plane program that is so misguided and expensive
that the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee (there's an
oxymoron for you) are starting to violate the confidentiality of the
committee's discussions in their anger. One senator calls it "totally
unjustified and very, very wasteful". Another calls it "unnecessary,
ineffective, over budget and too expensive". Despite this, not only
will the Republican dominated Congress probably approve this deranged
program, the voters who have to pay for it won't even know what their
money is being wasted on. In any other civilized country, this kind of
scandal would bring down the government in disgrace.
Uggabugga's Seal for Alberto Gonzales
On a lighter note, Uggabugga has suggested
the seal depicted above for the new US Department of Justice head,
since he's the guy that told the Pentagon, the president and others
that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply in the war on terror. The
translation is the mantra of the whole Bush regime: The End Justifies the Means.
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