For months now I’ve been saving string for a piece on the Washington Post’s endlessly fatuous series of editorials on Social Security and fiscal policy — the board seems caught between subservience to the silk-thin assumptions of right-leaning Washington conventional wisdom and an almost parodic level of ignorance about the effect these changes have on most Americans (see this for but one richly evocative example.)
But today’s piece is worth at least an interim mention. It is another knock at the Democrats for not buying into the president’s claim that Social Security is in a state of ‘crisis’.
Given what’s become clear over the last three months, the Post is compelled to concede that the president’s ‘plan’ does nothing to deal with Social Security’s solvency issues, that his tax cuts create a shortfall “three times greater than the Social Security shortfall projected by the trustees” and that Medicare is a far more pressing problem.
Still, the Post continues …
it’s hard to take seriously the Democrats who say that Mr. Bush should switch focus from Social Security to the much bigger problem of Medicare: If they aren’t willing to play a constructive role on the supposedly “minor” challenge of Social Security, why should anyone believe that they would behave constructively if the administration wanted to fix Medicare?
As the Post’s endless tergiversations for Washington’s new luxe Republican establishment again show us, you can work so hard bending over backwards for some folks that you find yourself bending over forward. As they have.
