Train Wrecks Past and Train Wrecks to Be

This essay by James Carroll in The Boston Globe strikes me as scarily dead-on, especially his predictions for how the Iraq debacle will play out in the long term.

And of course, the elections are perfectly timed to lead in to Herr President Bush's hour long commercial for Wall Street that will be this State of the Union address. The logic of course is that, well sure the reason we actually went to Iraq didn't exist at all, but now look at the happy results. So, sure, Americans really aren't buying wholeheartedly that there actually is a Social Security crisis, but privatization will work out just like Iraq see? At least the RNC is hoping this is how it will play out... At this point however, since Harry Reid has declared that there will be absolutely no Senate Democratic support for the President's plan for privatization (or personalization or warmfuzzyation or cuddlyteddybearation or whatever the RNC has decided to call it) of Social Security, it would appear to be dead in the water in any case. And some members of congress, such as Gene Taylor from Mississippi, are producing wonderfully lucid justifications for their opposition. One can only hope and pray that Dems follow his lead en masse and take this as an opportunity to parade the domestic debacle of fiscal policy that Bush has gotten away with now for four years. Apropos of this, this report by the GAO, entitled The Long Term Fiscal Challenge, one hopes would be a wake up call of some sort for someone in power in Washington, not to mention the rest of the country.

Is this idea, that someone in this country will start to wake up to the fact that the "crisis" right now is not Social Security but is in fact Bush's fiscal policy, simply laughable on its face? Some of the survey results in the report would seem to indicate that Americans are catching on to the idea that the current DC spending spree is not such a hot idea. Even if Rick Santorum has decided to describe the $1 to $2 trillion needed to fund Social Security applepiezation as "prepayment" instead of "deficit spending". The next time you use your credit card remember - you're not going into debt. Uh-uh, you're PRE-PAYING! Sweet!