Demagogue

Roger Lowenstein had a truly excellent piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine on the Republican's manufactured "Social Security crisis."

There is just way too much good stuff to excerpt, so I'll just encourage you to go and read the entire thing.

This paragraph, while not part of the central focus of the piece, is great

Social Security does not provide, and was not meant to provide, a satisfactory retirement on its own. The average stipend for a 65-year-old retiring today is $1,184 a month, or about $14,000 a year. About half of Americans also have private pension plans, but for two-thirds of the elderly, Social Security supplies the majority of day-to-day income. For the poorest 20 percent, about seven million, Social Security is all they have. Even those figures understate the program's importance. According to an agency publication, ''Income of the Population 55 or Older: 2000,'' 8 percent of elderly beneficiaries were poor, but a startling 48 percent would have been below the poverty line had they not been receiving Social Security. Charles Blahous, the White House point man on Social Security, publicly criticized this calculation as ''mindless,'' and the Social Security agency no longer computes the figure.

Typical - every time unpleasant facts threaten to undermine one of Bush's priorities, those facts just mysteriously disappear.