Hard Times.

With the Dubya deficit looming over the second term agenda (and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon) and the proposed Social Insecurity PSAs now costing trillions (per Vice-President Cheney), the administration releases a $2.57 trillion budget which “eliminates dozens of politically sensitive domestic programs, including funding for education, environmental protection and business development” and doubles the prescription drug copay for veterans. (America’s children and Armed Forces — our nation’s richest 1% thank you again for your sacrifice.)

I was at the movies during Dubya’s State of the Union address — I tried to watch it online this evening after my Radicalism sections, but Quicktime died in mid-sentence, so I just ended up reading it. And, while I thought it was very well-written as per the norm, my thoughts on the address have been colored even more than usual by the punditocracy. So, with that in mind, I’ll avoid being derivative and just direct y’all to the following:

Fred Kaplan: “Some of the president’s statements on national security were simply puzzling. Again on Iran, he said, ‘We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium-enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing.’ This is just false.“

Chris Suellentrop: “You could call Bush’s idea the Screw Your Grandchildren Act…This was the Greatest Love of All speech, in which Bush asserted that The Children Are Our Future. But before you sign on to Bush’s proposal, be aware that what he’s offering is pretty tough love.“

Will Saletan: “Tonight’s State of the Union Address demonstrated again that President Bush is a man of very clear principles. He’s just flexible about when to apply them.“

Joe Conason: “Although George W. Bush and the White House aides who craft these public spectacles become increasingly adept at manipulating the feelings of his audience every year, their underlying method remains the same: to shade inconvenient realities with rhetorical vagueness and outright deception.“

E.J. Dionne: “Our country could profit from an honest debate about the future of Social Security. Judging from President Bush’s State of the Union address, that is not the kind of debate we are about to have.“

Snowe drifts.

With the Congressional battle lines forming over Dubya’s coming Social Security overhaul, Senate Finance Committee member and GOP moderate Olympia Snowe voices her doubts on CNN, which could greatly benefit Dems in defeating the plan (if we get our act together.) “Raising broad objections to the substance and presentation of the White House case, Snowe made it clear she is not convinced that a Social Security crisis has arrived, as Bush maintains…And Snowe said she is ‘certainly not going to support diverting $2 trillion from Social Security into creating personal savings accounts'” (although she is not averse to the principle of PSAs in general).

The Other Shoe Drops.

Surprise, surprise. “The Bush administration has signaled that it will propose changing the formula that sets initial Social Security benefit levels, cutting promised benefits by nearly a third in the coming decades, according to several Republicans close to the White House.” Administration officials claim the deficit caused by this “price-indexing” change — pegging first-year benefits to inflation rather than the rise in wages — will be made up by, you guessed it, “personal investment accounts,” a.k.a. the Bush privatization plan. Funny how Dubya neglected to mention this cut only a few weeks ago…I doubt the plan was formulated over Christmas.

Preying on (Social) Insecurity.

Dubya starts the hard sell on his plan for privatizing Social Security, claiming such a move will reassure financial markets. “Mr. Bush never mentioned the near certainty that without raising taxes, which he has ruled out, any plan to add personal investment accounts to Social Security and improve its financial condition would include a reduction in the guaranteed retirement benefit.” Hmmm…that doesn’t sound very reassuring.

Burying the News.

The nation’s senior citizens got a dose of what they could expect from a second Bush term yesterday: a 17.5% hike in Medicare premiums. Nice of the Post to accentuate the screwy timing of the announcement: “As most Americans began the Labor Day holiday weekend, federal health officials held a late-afternoon briefing to announce that the 42 million disabled and elderly Medicare beneficiaries will be hit with the largest premium increase in 15 years.“

Botched Prescription?

In a boon for President Bush’s reelection chances, the GOP succeed in remaking Medicare. (At least the Dems can content themselves with defeating the energy bill.) To be honest, I haven’t been following this bill as closely as I should…I always get a bit annoyed when both parties prostrate themselves before the AARP, far and away the richest (and most likely to vote) portion of the electorate. In fact, the US spends 12 times more on its oldest, wealthiest citizens than it does on its children, even though kids are three times more likely to live below the poverty line. Hence, budget and deficit-busting prescription drug giveaways in the midst of child poverty…great investment.)

All that being said, Medicare is one of the foundations of the American social safety net, just as AFDC was until 1996, and as such this act is a biggie. Mickey Kaus of Slate seems to think the bill is actually good for Dems, while Urban Institute experts believe the back door to privatization is in fact only “window dressing.” But still, most Senators I trust came down against it (including John McCain, who railed against the giveaways to drug-makers in the bill.) And, while I still find it absurd that we’re giving prescription drug benefits to a select portion of the electorate before finding a way to insure every citizen, even paying lip service to the idea of privatizing Medicare does not seem a step in the right direction towards universal health care.

Finally, if this bill is so innocuous, why are the GOP so gung-ho for it? I hope it’s because they believe they wrested the Medicare issue away from the Democrats rather than due to any real movement towards privatization in the bill. Still, I fret. I mean, would you trust a prescription filled out by a cat-slaughterer?