The New Compassion

I can't watch Bush try to speak. Even when he isn't mangling the language, I can't handle the intellectual dishonesty. The real problem is that he will sometimes say something that sounds perfectly reasonable, like he's really trying to be that moderate he claims to be—only I find out later that it was all a rhetorical sham.

Last night was no different. There are quite a few good analyses up now about what his seemingly reasonable Social Security re-calculation plan will really do.

Josh Marshall has probably done more than any other regular citizen to save Social Security over the past six months or so, and you should definitely go and read what he has said and done.

But I actually want to quote from Sam Rosenfeld at The American Prospect blog, who has this to say:

NO NEW GOODIES. His anger is well-placed, but Josh Marshall actually fails to go far enough in his denunciation of a swoony press for being hoodwinked by the president’s progressive indexation proposal yesterday:

"Second, let's state specifically what this to-some-sexy-sounding proposal offers: steep benefit cuts for all but the lowest income Americans and meager increases in benefits for them."

This whole scheme is a dead duck anyway so maybe it’s not worth belaboring the point, but under Robert Pozen’s progressive indexation plan the poor would get no benefit increase at all -- not meager, not modest, not anything. Instead, the poor would simply be shielded from the gigundo benefit cuts that other Americans would experience on a sliding scale up the income ladder. That is to say, what the president generously proposed last night was to index low-income workers’ benefits according to the same formula used for all workers under the current system, and to slash everyone else’s benefits massively. That bleeding heart of his!

There's lots more detailed stuff at The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.