The only thing "flat bust" is the president's honesty

Josh Marshall, at the precipice of old age (he's 35, apparently) ponders his retirement and wonders what all the fuss is about.

[W]hat does this tell us? According to relatively pessimistic forecasts, two government agencies -- one of which is part of a Republican administration and the other under the oversight of a Republican congress -- say I'll get my full benefits for either the first five years of my retirement or the first fifteen years. After that, if nothing changes at all, I'll probably keep drawing three-quarters of my benefits. And even if I'm only drawing that three-quarters it'll still be more than today's retirees draw even in inflation-adjusted dollars.

This disconnect suggests one of three possibilities.

One is that the president has been briefed on certain highly classified budget projections which show a far more dire situation than the government's non-classified budgeting estimates would have us believe. We'll call this the secret evidence hypothesis.

Another possibility is that President Bush believes that the US government will default on the Treasury notes held by the Social Security Administration. Let's call this the Harken Energy hypothesis.

If it's neither of these we can only conclude that as he has done repeatedly before, this president is deceiving the people he has sworn to serve and defend in order to achieve a policy goal he cannot manage by honest means.

It is interesting that even though the press is reluctant to question the president when he says that, for someone in their twenties, Social Security will be "flat bust" when it's time for them to retire, Bush & Co. is having an unusually hard time selling this particular mushroom cloud. Even though Bush assumed (and why not) that Repub's would fall in line behind a "reform" he has not yet proposed, and that enough Dems would be cowed (again, why not) into playing along, Dems are relatively unified in opposition to anything that involves private accounts, borrowing 2 trillion bucks, and still cutting benefits. And Repubs are realizing that, unlike invading another country and killing a few Iraqis, their constituents back home are a little more sensitive to killing Social Security. Even that cheerleader for the "ownership society, David Brooks, was clearly backing away from full blown support in his comments last night on NPR.