Friday, February 04, 2005
Editorial: Bush's costly modus operandi
As with tax cuts, as with Iraq, now with Social Security: The president justifies policy goals by making up problems the policy purports to solve.
From the RoundTable blog
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Perhaps the president is not lying, which implies conscious intent. Perhaps he simply does not recognize what he's doing. But conscious or not, his modus operandi - fixate on a policy goal first, then manufacture a problem it purports to solve, regardless of the truth of the matter - has things backward. Policy should arise in response to real problems in need of repair, not adopted and then justified by problems spun out of thin air.
The latest example, stressed in Bush's State of the Union speech Wednesday night, is "privatizing" Social Security. It is needed, the president said, to save a program otherwise headed toward bankruptcy.
But the program isn't headed for bankruptcy. No less a conservative eminence than columnist George Will has noted that a case against Social Security cannot be made on fiscal grounds.
Social Security is hardly the first example of the Bush modus operandi.
As a presidential candidate in 2000, Bush cited then-robust economic growth and the federal budget's then-surpluses to justify tax cuts. After his election, he cited the economic slowdown and federal deficits to justify tax cuts.
Then, of course, there's Iraq. Whatever the merits of the U.S. invasion and occupation, and however it ultimately turns out, the operation was sold by Bush on the specious grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
During initial invasion planning (planning for the post-invasion occupation was notable mostly for its absence), this appeared to be a plausible possibility. By the time of the invasion, however, the work of U.N. arms inspectors was fast making it implausible. Bush lurched ahead anyway.
This is faith-based rather than fact-based problem-solving, and the president's relentless embrace of it carries a steep price.
The gravest threat today to Social Security's fiscal health is the prospective diversion of revenues that Bush's privatization "reform" itself would entail. The gravest threat today to the country's finances are the tax cuts on which he insists. And the gravest threat today to the nation's security is the growing numbers of Islamist terrorists inadvertently engendered by Bush's bellicose ways.
