Bush's $6 trillion botch (Fix a 3T Soc Sec problem while passing a 6T drug

[papau]

They even mock Bush's "supposed bravery in tackling Social Security"..."his plan basically consists of 1) promising a free lunch and 2) borrowing more trillions to siphon into private accounts and money managers' commissions."



Bush's $6 trillion botch
Louisville, Kentucky Opinion Journal, editorial
January 04, 2005

The urgency of President Bush and congressional Republicans to barge ahead with "fixing" Social Security is understandable.

If they let too much time pass, people might wise up to the appalling botch they made in supposedly fixing Medicare and then rein them in before they can deliver the Social Security "reforms" their Wall Street backers want.

In case you missed it during the Christmas holidays, the Government Accounting Office just calculated the staggering scope of that botch.

The Medicare drug benefit the administration muscled through Congress, without even a pretense of funding and with deliberately misleading estimates, will add $6 trillion to $8 trillion to Medicare's shortfall over the next 75 years, the GAO determined.

That is nearly double the Social Security shortfall that President Bush is acting so alarmed about, and it "is one of the largest unfunded liabilities ever undertaken by the federal government," said Comptroller General David Walker, head of the GAO.

Medicare's financial distress, he said, "is much bigger (than Social Security's), it is much more immediate, and it is going to be much more difficult to effectively address." <snip>


http://www.courierjournal.com/cjextra/editorials/2005/01/04/opin-bot0104-2947.html