Paul Krugman makes two important points today. First, the evidence that Alan Greenspan is a partisan is just undeniable. After pressuring the Clinton administration to focus on debt reduction, he endorsed Bush’s tax cuts and then backed private accounts in Social Security this week even though the President has presided over a massive deterioration in the nation’s finances. This is a betrayal of the public trust — Greenspan wields vast power as an unelected official, and he should not use his position to promote his personal political objectives.

Second, Krugman has a good description of a Bush administration rhetorical maneuver that’s key to how they’re promoting private accounts:

The way privatizers link the long-run financing of Social Security with the case for private accounts parallels the three-card-monte technique the Bush administration used to link terrorism to the Iraq war. Speeches about Iraq invariably included references to 9/11, leading much of the public to believe that invading Iraq somehow meant taking the war to the terrorists. When pressed, war supporters would admit they lacked evidence of any significant links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, let alone any Iraqi role in 9/11 – yet in their next sentence it would be 9/11 and Saddam, together again.

Similarly, calls for privatization invariably begin with ominous warnings about Social Security’s financial future. When pressed, administration officials admit that private accounts would do nothing to improve that financial future. Yet in the next sentence, they once again link privatization to the problem posed by an aging population.

Here’s an example of how this works from Dick Cheney’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday. He first introduced private accounts as a way to help younger workers. “[A]s we fix Social Security, we must make the system a better deal for younger workers,” Cheney said, “and the best way to reach that goal is through voluntary personal retirement accounts.” But by the time he concluded his discussion of private accounts, the Vice President was implying that they help resolve the Social Security system’s funding shortfall, saying, “Personal accounts are part of a comprehensive solution to help the nation resolve the long-term challenges to Social Security in a way that is fair to future generations.”