The State of the Union
If you’re not someone who closely follows politics, Bush’s State of the Union probably came across as a combination of sweeping vision and common-sense proposals. But if you compare the speech closely to reality, the gap between the two is startling. I’ll limit myself to two issues (if you want more, see the Center for American Progress blog entries on the speech – they covered everything).
The Federal deficit: since before the 2004 election campaign began, Bush has been promising to cut the deficit in half by the end of his second term. This is representative of a standard White House tactic: keep saying the same thing consistently and repeatedly, regardless of reality, and you’ll eventually get enough people to believe it. Bush can only make this projection by excluding: 1. the ongoing expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2. his own proposal to make his tax cuts permanent, and 3. the transition costs of enacting his Social Security plan. Add those up and the deficit explodes.
I’ve noticed that when I make arguments like this, my Republican friends emphatically respond that Bush is not a liar. In this case, they would argue that the future costs of the war on terror aren’t known, and legislation regarding the tax cuts and Social Security may or may not pass, so it’s perfectly reasonable for the Bush administration to make its budget projections strictly on known revenue and expenses. That’s nonsense. This was a State of the Union speech, which is about what Bush wants to achieve. He’s quite clearly saying he plans to cut the deficit in half, stay militarily engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, make a staggeringly expensive transition to a different Social Security program, and make permanent (and even further expand) his tax cuts for the wealthy. If any other politician proposed all these things in a single speech he’d be laughed off the stage. Yet Bush is taken seriously as someone who will get the federal government’s financial house in order. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Social Security: the left-leaning blogs have been all over this (Josh Marshall has blogged about nothing else for weeks), so I’ll just make a few points:
1. To get folks in crisis mode, Bush said in his speech that Social Security will go bankrupt in future decades if we don’t take drastic action soon. As I’ve mentioned before, both sides of this debate are guilty of phony accounting. The real crisis is not a Social Security crisis, it’s a deficit spending crisis. All the money in the so-called trust fund has been drained away over the past few decades to cover general federal spending. This borrowing has been happening through both Democratic and Republican administrations, so both sides are evading the real issue and are instead having a debate about the “trust fund” as if there was actual money sitting in it.
2. What came as a surprise even to me is that plain old Social Security benefits may very well give you more retirement money than an intelligently invested private plan. Check out this excellent Christian Science Monitor article: One man’s retirement math: Social Security wins
3. Up until this speech, I was thinking along the lines of Kevin Drum, who suggested that maybe all Bush is really after is instituting tax-free savings accounts. That is, by over-reaching for plan Y, it becomes easier for everyone to agree on a more modest plan X, when X is all he was really after in the first place (whereas otherwise just getting to X would have been a fight). But last night Bush really spelled out his plan and indicated that he’ll go to the mat for it. With the Democrats united against it, and a number of Republicans already falling off the bandwagon, I think Bush is going to get his first major legislative defeat. I’m guessing he thinks he can repeat the arm-twisting that worked for getting the prescription drug bill passed, but as a President already sailing towards lame-duck status, and the popularity of this proposal in doubt, he doesn’t have the same kind of leverage this time.
Update: I just read Ed Kilgore’s take on this, and he essentially agrees with Kevin Drum: “Going all the way back to Texas, Bush’s M.O. has been extremely consistent: push your proposals again and again and again without compromising at all, until the moment when defeat is imminent, and then either cut a deal or switch to something else, with never a hint that anything has changed. So what if the Republican chairmen of the House Committee and Subcommittee with jurisdiction over Social Security have called Bush’s proposal DOA? Admitting that before the White House is ready for Plan B, whatever it is, would be like, well, admitting Mistakes Were Made In Iraq.”
