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[tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

D THEREAFTER



AUSTIN, Texas -- In the Texas legislature, they are called 
"prior-roarities," such a happy coinage. What should come prior?

When the pitter-patter of falling year-end columns comes again, not 
necessarily next year, but certainly four years from now, I fearlessly 
forecast a dismal unanimity: that the Bush Administration II suffers 
from bad and dumb prior-roarities.

Actually, the passage of time is not required for proof -- look around. 
The Bushies are about to launch a $50 million to $100 million dollar 
propaganda campaign to convince us the Social Security system is in 
crisis. Actually, it's not. It's quite robust and has astonishingly low 
administrative costs, less than 1 percent.

According to President Bush's own Commission to "Strengthen Social 
Security," the administrative costs of keeping track of private accounts 
will be 10 to 30 times the cost of administering the current system.

The Socialy Security System is in no danger whatsoever of going broke or 
even of having to pay out less than full compensation for at least 50 
years. There are any number of statistical models and premises one can 
argue about here, but when the administration begins with a premise that 
requires fixing Social Security based on an extrapolation to infinity, 
you know you are not dealing with people who argue in good faith.

Even if Social Security were in full-fledged crisis, none of the 
sensible, cheap, effective ways to fix it would involve the massive 
trillion-dollar boondoggle this administration contemplates.

Let's get this straight. The Republicans do not want to fix Social 
Security, they want to kill it. Period. They don't want to "partially 
privatize" Social Security, they want to end it. What they want is a 
private pension system like the one their pointy-headed heroes at the 
University of Chicago dreamed up for Chile, the poster child of why we 
should not do this.

This same rigid, inflexible, impractical the-market-is-always-best 
ideology is like a form of mania with these folks. As Paul Krugman 
patiently points out, "Claims that stocks will always yield high, 
low-risk returns are just bad economics."

In fact, it's more than passingly reminiscent of another rigid, 
inflexible, politico-economic orthodoxy: communism. And just as capable 
of robustly ignoring reality.

And for robustly ignoring reality, you can't hardly beat spending $50 
million to $100 million on a propaganda campaign to convince America 
there's something seriously wrong with Social Security while you ignore 
the collapse of the American health care system. It is common to begin 
all discussions of American health care with a complete lie, uttered in 
this example by President Bush: "We live in a great country that has got 
the best health care system in the world, and we need to keep it that way."

The peerless investigative team of Donald Bartlett and James Steele 
reports in their new book, "Critical Condition: How Health Care in 
America Became Big Business -- and Bad Medicine," one of our most 
enduring myths is that we have "world class health care."

"To be sure, it does offer the very best of care to some folks," they 
write. "It does offer world-class high-tech surgery and some space-age 
medical procedures. But these benefit 2 or 3 percent of the population 
at most, along with the richest citizens of other countries who come 
here for the highly specialized treatment. ... Many countries around the 
world take far better care of their people, achieve better results for 
their health care system and do it all with far fewer dollars. ... The 
statistics are even grimmer when life span is counted in years of 
healthy living. ... By this measure, the United States in 2002 ranked a 
distant 29th among the countries of the world, between Slovenia and 
Portugal."

Now, that's a problem. So is global warming. So is dependence on foreign 
oil. Social Security is not a problem. We are, however, about to be 
swamped by an election-style campaign to convince us it is.

According to The Washington Post: "Several GOP groups close to the White 
House are asking the same donors who helped re-elect Bush to fund an 
extensive campaign to convince Americans -- and skeptical lawmakers -- 
that Social Security is in crisis and that private accounts are the only 
cure.

"Progress for America, an independent group that backed Bush, has set 
aside about $9 million to support the president's Social Security plan. 
... The group is asking its donors for more.

"Stephen Moore, head of the Club for Growth, has raised $1.5 million, 
and hopes to reach a $15 million target. ... Those contributions are 
likely to be dwarfed by those from corporate trade associations, 
spearheaded by the National Association of Manufacturers. Other likely 
contributors include the financial services and securities industries. ..."

I'll say they're likely contributors. This is a giant fee-generating 
scheme for Wall Street.

Prior-roarities.