08 February 2006

Vox Populi, Vox Ignoramus ("The voice of the people is a voice that should be ignored")

Josh Marshall already linked to this, so you may have seen it. Oh, it also appeared in a newspaper called the Washington Post. You may remember the big Social Security plan Bush was going to sell to us all after he won his 'mandate' in '04? The plan that got less popular among the public with every public stop he made to tout it? The plan hat was declared dead by death-declarers in both parties?

Well Bush has put every last drop of it in this year's budget proposal. See It Now. No fanfare, no goodwill tour, no SOTU mention, just slide it in and hope no one reads the bill. How unlike him. And we would call it underhanded and disgusting, but of course the real problem is not him doing it, it's that it could work.

An interesting fact to us is that Bush and Co. seem to want to do progressive indexation, which is, don't you know, 'practically communist,' to your core conservative types. We're pretty sure it either wasn't explained to Bush properly, or if it was that there is some angle for him in it somewhere. Maybe if he gets it passed he'll cause an inflation crisis and reap the higher benefits.

At some point we're just going to have to knuckle under, and change the 8th grade civics class lesson about "how a bill becomes a law." e.g.:

"Well, first some dirty lobbyist sees a moneymaking opportunity, then he bribes a few key congressmen, they do a couple dirty backroom deals, and then they slide it into a bigger bill late at night so no one will ever read it, and they sleep better than you do, because they have no souls. And that's how a bill becomes a law."

"But where do the bigger bills come from?"

"God makes those. That's why they're called "omnibus" bills. Study harder in math and science"

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