Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Great Moments In Dangerous Idiocy

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George Bush, math whiz:
""A lot of people in America think there is a trust -- that we take your money in payroll taxes and then we hold it for you and then when you retire, we give it back to you," Bush said later in a speech at the University of West Virginia at Parkersburg. "But that's not the way it works. There is no trust fund, just IOUs that I saw firsthand," Bush said."
Yes, he's out there doing the only thing he does well: trying to scare America:
"Using a government filing cabinet as a prop, President Bush yesterday played to fears that the Social Security Trust Fund is little more than a stack of worthless IOUs."
Government bonds? Pure fraud! In fact, you may just want to start putting your money in an old sock under the floorboards, since his statements yesterday have the implication that the entire financial system of the United States is a gigantic hoax. As Charles Rangel pointed out, the ability of the government to even insure bank accounts is being called into question, let alone the questions this could raise in the minds of foreign investors about our ability to meet our obligations to them and the impact their resulting fears could have on our whole economy. Bush used the image of the papers in a file cabinet to underline the perilous lack of substance in the trust fund, a classic Rovian tack. But he won't lead you to obvious extrapolation...that the investments he wants people to make on Wall Street in place of SS are also just pieces of paper, as the suicidal investors of 1929 found out. Never mind. It's all good if it helps the Dauphin get his way.

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