Many successful politicians possess the oratorical skill and charismatic presence to convince the citizenry that up is down, down is up, light is darkness and darkness light.
The skilled politico makes the electorate always believe he is their chum, even when they are being played for chumps
Bush's proposal to divert some Social Security funding into private accounts will mean the program's inevitable financial drain will be speeded up, not reversed.
Even as our president organizes rallies across the United States to urge privatization, Bush refuses to raise wage caps on the payroll tax or regulate pharmaceutical-industry prices, two methods of strengthening Social Security.
President Bush's tax-cut-and-spend philosophy is significantly lowering our economic status. The euro is rapidly replacing the dollar as the international currency of choice.
We have been blessed that Europe (yes, "Old" Europe), Japan and China continue to purchase billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury bonds and notes. The sale of this U.S. Treasury debt has kept the federal government solvent during Bush's presidency. If or when foreign nations stop buying the bonds, the United States will be in critical fiscal trouble.
Through his mammoth deficit spending and the giant behemoth of national debt that he is creating, Bush is directly causing a much bigger financial debacle for the United States in a far shorter time than Social Security will experience.
Bush and his Capitol cadres are running - ruining - our nation into cataclysmic debt. We are in a devastatingly expensive war launched by the United States against Iraq, yet where are the tax increases needed to pay for the military and infrastructure costs of this war?
Bush keeps borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to operate the federal government while simultaneously boasting about cutting taxes.
But it's we citizens who must pay back every dollar owed in the national debt, including trillions of dollars worth of interest payments - trillions of dollars that otherwise could have been kept in our wallets, and in the wallets of generations of Americans not yet born.
Earnest and endearingly sincere, the president warns the nation of Social Security's eventual shortfall. Yet Bush's privatization plan does nothing to add revenues into Social Security. While his supporters praise Bush for his single-mindedness, this president is blindingly incapable of recognizing his own failed fiscal policy.
The president's economic perception is akin to a credit-card user who spends far beyond what he could ever possibly pay back, and yet keeps buying more and more with plastic cards, oblivious to the consequences.
These powerful elected officials must recognize when up is up, and down is down. If Bush has his way, then we collectively will experience a long fall down.
