1115.org

After 60 days traveling the country and misleading fawning, hand-picked audiences about a Social Security privatization plan that he hasn’t yet provided details for, 10% fewer Americans support the President on Social Security now than did two months ago. Two main concerns persist, and last night’s prime-time press conference did nothing to change that dynamic. First, human beings are risk adverse, and Social Security, as a defined benefit program, removes risk in an area that most would like to avoid it: retirement income. Second, through constant action, Democrats and others who oppose privatization have forced the President to concede that private accounts do nothing to address the long term health of Social Security.

The President’s handlers, obviously not pleased with the current prospects for privatization or the rest of their agenda, hoped to reverse the lame duck vibe that has been hovering over them like a storm cloud with a press conference. In the few times the President has used this format, he has been floated vague questions that he has been able to deflect without so much as an attempt to answer. But a President at a mid-40% approval rating isn’t shown the same deference as a war President, and for the first time in quite some time, those reporters who had occasion to be called on responded with direct queries not easily brushed off. Think Progress live-blogged the press conference, and has point-by-point rebuttals that I’ll not duplicate here.

I did want to touch on something that we’ve covered here on several occasions because it reveals a specific instance of the President misleading the public and a textbook example of trying to have his cake and making someone else pay the political price for it; in short, the Bush style. Shortly after the new year, in an attempt to scare people into supporting privatization, the president started using words like “flat bust” and “bankrupt” to describe the future of Social Security if a radical change wasn’t instituted. He continues to use similar formulations months after studies by the Congressional Budget Office and Social Security trustees show that if nothing at all was done, 70-80% of promised benefits would still be paid.

Since a 20-30% shortfall isn’t enough to convince Americans to allow their elected officials to radically overhaul what they feel is their right to a minimum level of retirement, the President, to this day, insists on lying about Social Security’s outlook. The method he uses to give some cover to the bald-faced lies he peddles is that the Social Security trust fund, the one that all workers have been paying extra taxes since 1983 to fund, simply doesn’t exist. To prove his point, he even went to the Office of Public Debt Accounting in Parkersburg, WV for a photo-op where he looked at the U.S. Treasury bonds that comprise the trust fund and denied their existance.

On Thursday night, when my time would have been much better spent watching a 12-year-old rerun of Beverly Hills 90210, I heard the President once again change terminology (since “private accounts” and “personal accounts” didn’t work) to “voluntary personal retirement accounts”. Next up will be “voluntary personal retirement account related program activities”. Watch.

It was this that stuck out however:

I know some Americans have reservations about investing in the stock market, so 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.

In addressing a risk averse public, the President suggested that they could avoid risk altogether and invest their voluntary personal retirement accounts in the world’s most secure investment instrument, U.S. Treasury bonds. He even went out of his mind way to remind them that the bonds “are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.”

So what we have here is a mess. People don’t want to risk their retirements on rolling the dice in the market, so Bush lets them invest solely in bonds. But the same bonds that they would be buying have already been described by the President as “just pieces of paper.” And he couldn’t have made a case for private accounts without counting the bonds in the trust fund as worthless.

It’s hard to tell whether the chicken or the egg came first, but it’s impossible to make chicken salad out of this chicken shit.