Deceptions, Sleights of Hand, and Lies

Okay... So we're going to continue to pretend that Social Security taxes (which, until you have a very substantial income, are based upon a percentage of your income) are not "income taxes". Despite some pre-Bush II complaints by, for example, John McCain, neither major political party seems to object to that little deception.

And we're going to continue to ridicule the notion of the "lock box", Al Gore's all-too-often repeated buzzword for the theoretical mechanism he would have theoretically implemented to keep Congress from looting the theoretical "Social Security Trust Fund" to pay for current budget obligations.

So perhaps that is why Bush-II-style Social Security privateers... er, privatizers... think it will be easy to transition to the unadulterated lie:

[Future Social Security obligations] would have been less daunting had we saved the very substantial Social Security surpluses of the past two decades. Instead, we mostly spent them, particularly in the past four years, leaving behind a much-touted Social Security trust fund that is, in reality, a myth.

All that resides in the trust fund is a $1.5 trillion pile of IOUs from the federal government, obligations likely to be honored by increasing the national debt. In addition, according to the trustees, we would have to deposit an additional $3.7 trillion into the trust fund today to ensure solvency until 2078. Is that a crisis or just a problem?

Is, then, Bush going to go on camera and say "I lied to the American people when I said the rich pay too much income taxes as compared to the working masses, because I said that the Social Security tax was a 'payroll tax' and not an 'income tax'. But because we 'compassionate conservatives' have now blessed the theft of the entire Social Security Trust Fund in the name of fiscal responsibility to pay for obligations which should have been satisfied from the general fund, and have no intention of repaying that money despite the legal mandates that we honor our nation's debts, as it turns out it was an income tax after all - and one that was subject to double and triple taxation. Boy, do I feel the egg on my face. Middle class tax relief is on the way."