Buzz Bubbleboy: To Infinity and Beyond!

Is anything on earth so phony and fake that Bush won’t say it to the press? In the recent campaign, Bush promised to cut the federal deficit in half by the year 2009. In Sunday’s Times, Edmund Andrews explained how the great man plans to do it:

ANDREWS (1/2/05): To make Mr. Bush's goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year's actual shortfall of $413 billion.

By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.

Incredible, isn’t it? Rather than cut the actual deficit in half, Bush will tackle an imaginary deficit—a projected deficit, one that never existed, one he pulled straight outta his keister.

Wait. There's more.

If you've lent even one ear to the administration's recent comments on Social Security, you have no doubt heard President Bush and his aides asserting that a $10 trillion shortfall threatens the retirement system —and the economy itself. That $10 trillion hole is the basis of the president's claim last month that ''the [Social Security] crisis is now.”

[...]

Starting last year, as the groundwork was being set for the emerging debate, the Social Security trustees took the liberty of projecting the system's solvency over infinity, rather than sticking to the traditional 75-year time horizon. That world-without-end assumption generates the scary $10 trillion estimate, and with it, Mr. Bush's putative rationale for dismantling Social Security in favor of a system centered on private savings accounts.

Read the rest of the Daily Howler post to get the real figures. Bush is financing his tax cut for the wealthy by dismantling Social Security.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.