It’s an inimitable Bush tactic: point out a problem in order to bolster your ideological plans… but don’t ever actually do anything about the problem itself.
He’s been traveling around (on your dime, by the way) pushing his Social Security plan — a conservative dogma that is designed to help, again, the rich and put your money into risk.
Bush tends to try out many different arguments for his ill-conceived plans until one sticks. Remember Iraq? He went through about a dozen reasons to invade before sticking with WMD; of course, now that turned out to be as much of a lie as the others so he’s turned to “freedom” as the excuse, and how do you debunk something as intangible as that? Anyway, here’s one of his new arguments on Social Security: that black Americans are being shortchanged.
“The president said Social Security reform is especially important to the African American community because it is so closely tied to life expectancies,” said Michelle D. Bernard, senior vice president of the Independent Women’s Forum, who attended the session.
Black Americans’ life expectancy is 72.3 years — more than five years shorter than for whites. Black men die even sooner, living an average of 68.8 years, compared with 75.1 years for white men. It is a disparity Bush has highlighted as he has campaigned for personal retirement accounts.
“If you really think about that, you have people putting money in the system that aren’t — families won’t benefit from the system,” Bush said last month in an interview with The Washington Post. “And, therefore, it seems to me to make sense, if I were a part of a group of people that were being disadvantaged by the Social Security system, that I’d at least like to have the opportunity to have some of the money I put in the system passable to my family.”
Oh, that George Bush — he’s so compassionate toward his black brethren. Now that he seems to have discovered the life-span disparity, do you think he’ll jump up and do something about it? Like, I dunno, create better health care programs for all those women he won’t allow to have abortions? Ways to cut crime among inner-city youth? Anything? Anything?
This reminds me of the whole prescription drug plan. Drugs just cost too much and the drug companies are gouging us — especially senior citizens. So Bush comes along and says that he’s going to do something about it. Were I in his place, I think the first thing I would have looked at was… the drug companies. “Lower your prices, guys!” I’d say. “A huge amount of your research comes from federally-funded universities, etc.!”
Nope. In the Bush universe, the corporations never have to take any blame. As far as I can tell, they were never approached by the administration to cut their prices… they were only approached for campaign donations. What we got was the status quo, but with a discount card that doesn’t give a discount to a vast majority of people.
But it certainly looks like he did something to the gullible masses.
