Many people who read my column regularly have probably noticed that I like to back up my opinions with facts.
I take pride in that because I work hard and try to do some research to make sure that I get my facts right.
After all, what good are opinions if you don’t have any facts to back them up?
But sometimes facts can be tricky, especially when one deals with numbers.
Information and numbers can be twisted so that something that really isn’t a fact can be passed off as one.
Bush’s State of the Union address last week was filled with these number-playing tricks.
A big part of Bush’s speech had to do with Social Security privatization.
Bush said people would have full control over their Social Security money, and they could give their invested money to their children and grandchildren upon death.
This claim is very misleading.
In the administration’s plan, a person would be required to put a large portion of the money they invest into annuities upon his or her retirement.
Any money held in an annuity disappears upon a person’s death. There goes bequeathing the money, which is under “your full control,” to your grandchildren.
The president also said the plan would help fix Social Security permanently. The day after the State of the Union, an administration official anonymously told the LA Times that it wouldn’t help the problem at all.
The Bush administration has now all but officially conceded that point.
A Washington Post article goes further, saying that Bush’s plan could reduce benefits for those born today by 50 percent compared to current payouts.
Bush also mentioned liability reform in his speech. He oddly singled out liability due to asbestos poisoning.
However, this focus on asbestos may be explained by the fact that Halliburton recently lost a $30 million suit brought against it by 100 families.
The families were suing because of asbestos poisoning in the military by a company Halliburton purchased when Vice President Dick Cheney was its CEO.
Bush also said that he was cutting 150 programs to try to cut the deficit in half by 2009.
The first barrier to Bush cutting the deficit is the at least $5 trillion over 10 years that would be spent on the war in Iraq, privatizing Social Security and making Bush’s tax cuts permanent.
President Bush also didn’t list what programs he was intending to cut, and for good reason.
The Seattle Times reports that the White House’s plan cuts $4.3 billion from education programs, $1.3 billion from law enforcement grants, eliminates federal support for AMTRAK, and would cut $100 million from land and water conservation grants, just to start.
In all, Bush’s cuts for 2006 would be worth an estimated $25 billion to $30 billion.
Bush supports increased military spending, though, raising it to over $400 billion.
That’s enough to pay a year’s full tuition for 12 million students at Harvard.
On the other hand, projections estimate that rolling back Bush’s tax cuts could result in the deficit being cut in half immediately.
One item that I didn’t hear was the president calling on all of the brave, patriotic Republicans who support the Iraq war to quit their jobs, pick up their rifles and take the first flight to Baghdad to help relieve the troop situation.
Instead, if troops stay at their current levels, and especially if we end up invading Syria or Iran, troops will have to come from somewhere, and it’s doubtful that most of them will come voluntarily.
Also, the Iraqi elections are looking more and more like an unquestionable failure.
Last week I said that the elections were a good first step. That was based on turnout numbers that were around 50 percent at the time.
Oops.
According to a BBC article and confirmed by an AP article, most of the areas with high turnout have been counted, with only Sunni areas, which had single-digit turnout, left to go.
The current count is about 4 million votes, with maybe 100,000 or 200,000 more votes expected.
That translates to a turnout under 30 percent.
Fifty percent turnout is one thing. Less than 1 in 3 Iraqis voting is something completely different.
All the conservative commentators in the press were railing on some people because of their predictions of a failed election.
Looks like those people were right, just as they were about Iraq’s WMDs.
Well, that ends this week’s edition. The wombat hopes to see you here next week, same time, same place.

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