In a Washington Post story on President Bush’s speech at a Republican fundraiser Tuesday, Mike Allen and Michael A. Fletcher repeat a classic misleading Bush administration statistic:

Bush said he has “laid out some plans that would nearly fix all of the Social Security problem.” The White House has said the plans he has outlined would close about 70 percent of the gap that is projected to open between promised Social Security benefits and the taxes that will be owed.

But here’s what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found when it looked into that claim:

These [White House] alterations in the Pozen [“progressive indexing”] proposal
result in the President’s proposal eliminating 59 percentof the
75-year Social Security deficit, rather than 70 percent. The White House has
claimed its plan would close 70 percent of the gap and that the Pozen plan
would close 81 percent of the gap. It turns out that the White House is
referring to the percentage of the solvency gap that would be closed in a
single year — the 75^th year (i.e., 2079). However, the
standard way of measuring the degree to which a proposal restores solvency is
to measure its effect on the total shortfall over the next 75 years, and the
White House plan closes only 59 percent of the 75-year shortfall.

In addition, the Center found that when Bush’s private accounts proposal is added into the calculation, his plan only closes 30 percent of the 75-year Social Security shortfall.

Allen and Fletcher should know better — the Post has been a leader in critical coverage of the President’s misleading claims. Let’s hope this isn’t a sign that the newspaper is backing off.