Month: February 2005
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Bush’s assertions about investment returns
During a visit to Nebraska yesterday, President Bush made the following set of claims: [A] personal retirement account will earn a greater rate of return than that which your money earns in the Social Security trust. That’s an important point for people to understand. If you invest your money in conservative stocks and bonds, you’re
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Dean’s “Hillary Rules”
The American Prospect’s Garance Franke-Ruta passes along an astute observation on Tapped: One of the smartest centrists I know recently noted that Dean will be operating, in Washington, under “Hillary Rules.” This is certainly true; anything Dean says will be subjected to tremendous scrutiny, and he will be operating with no room for error. And
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The White House beats down the press
Lori Robertson has a long article in American Journalism Review about the relationship between the White House and the press. It covers most of the same ground as chapter 2 of All the President’s Spin, but Robertson’s piece is noteworthy for demonstrating how far the press and DC establishment have come toward acquiesing to the
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Political reasoning for five-year-olds
I’ll have a lot more to say about the Republican Social Security memo (PDF), but I have to start by joining Matthew Yglesias in ridiculing this passage from a suggested speech, which might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read: Let me leave you with a question: Why should young people who will retire around
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More White House suggestions of zero benefits
In the New York Times this morning, the White House
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Senior scare tactics not a strawman
Thomas Lang, one of the indefatigable CJR Daily bloggers, claims in a new post that this passage from an AP report is mistaken: President Bush, on a campaign-style road trip to pressure recalcitrant Democrats and reluctant Republicans on a Social Security, warned Friday against “scare tactics” in the burgeoning debate. The president decried the kind
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“A Suicidal Selection”
The always insightful Jonathan Chait makes the definitive, devastating case against Howard Dean becoming chairman of the DNC: The conventional rap against Dean as DNC chairman is essentially the same as the conventional rap against him as presidential candidate a year ago. Namely, he reinforces all the party’s weaknesses. Democrats need to appeal to culturally
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More fine print – the “benefit offset”
The Washington Post fills in more details on how private accounts are not a free lunch. Note: The Post has corrected the story linked above, so I deleted the quote from the original version that was here before and added the new one below, which explains how the “benefit offset” works. Somehow, this didn’t make
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Bush budget trickery goes down the memory hole
A prize to Andrew Sullivan, who wrote this while blogging the SOTU, in which Bush claimed that his upcoming budget “stays on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009”: FISCAL SANITY? I’m having trouble believing this president on that particular issue. 2009? I thought the goal was 2008. And why not balance the
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The AP fact-checks Bush so I don’t have to
Calvin Woodward explains the (misleading) free lunch implications of the SOTU: The devil was in the missing details Wednesday night when President Bush showcased his Social Security plan and claimed advances on jobs and against terrorism that don’t tell the full story. Bush explained in detail how, under his proposal, younger workers would be able