Truth - Al Franken [79]
I propose that one investment option consist entirely of treasury bonds, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.
Man, he must have been flyin’.
Besides solvency and Bush’s metaphysical problems with the Trust Fund, there was one more argument against the Social Security status quo—one that raised the biggest red flag that the President was being more than a little disingenuous. Social Security needed to be overhauled, he said, because it was unfair to black people.
One is tempted to give Bush credit for his newly discovered interest in the problems of African-Americans. Until, that is, one learns the details. As it turns out, although blacks do have many problems in George W. Bush’s America (for example, in some major cities, black men have an unemployment rate of over 50 percent), the fairness of Social Security isn’t one of them.
Bush laid out the problem at a staged “Conversation on Social Security Reform” on a January morning in our nation’s capital. This part of the staged conversation was with Bob McFadden, a health care consultant who happened to be African-American.
BUSH: African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people. And that needs to be fixed. (Applause.)
MCFADDEN: I agree, Mr. President, because from the minimal research that I’ve done, the average African-American male life expectancy is sixty-nine. And I may be off a little bit. But if you’re telling me that it’s 69, and the age is going to go to sixty-seven, you do the math. (Laughter.)
BUSH: Right.
The math was easy. But Karl Rove didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
MCFADDEN: That’s two years. (Laughter.)
BUSH: Glad you came. Thanks.
McFadden had done his job: giving voice to the inescapable conclusion that the average black male would receive Social Security for only two years. But while numbers themselves do not lie, the Republicans who use them often do.
What McFadden hadn’t discovered in his “minimal research” was that the numbers that he had been instructed to parrot came from a 1998 report by the extremely untrustworthy Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank not known for its leadership in the civil rights arena. That particular study had been cited by a Social Security actuary for “major errors in the methodology” and “incorrect or inappropriate assumptions.” In fact, as the actuary pointed out, “the non-white population actually enjoys the same or better expected rates of return from Social Security than for the white population.”
How was Heritage so wrong? Well, while errors in methodology and incorrect or inappropriate assumptions are seldom considered funny, the Heritage ones are fall-down, pee-in-your-pants hilarious.
First of all, the study assumed that every African-American man would live to exactly sixty-nine years of age, and then drop dead. No child died for lack of medical attention, no young black man died in an industrial accident or from neighborhood violence, no wise old black man rocked in a rocking chair on his porch with his great-grandchildren on his knee. It was work work work, pay into Social Security, retire at sixty-seven, collect benefits for two years, and then keel over. No exceptions.
Sure, it made the math easier. And it would remove some of the guesswork