Wordyard

I was going to rant about the Bush budget, and how full of misrepresentations and bad assumptions and failures to make tough choices it is. Then I realized that there isn’t enough time in the day for me to cover all that ground. So let me just point out that we all have extremely rotten luck to have such a merrily profligate president at this moment in history — one whose fixation on a lopsided tax-cutting agenda has rendered him entirely indifferent to the way he is mortgaging the nation’s future.

“We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations,” Bush told us in his State of the Union. Sounded good. Only that’s precisely what his budget does. In simultaneously boosting spending and cutting taxes, Bush is putting our economy into the same train-wreck mode that we last experienced in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s “We can fight Vietnam and have a Great Society” spending spree. It took two decades to clean up that mess.

For the past 20 years or so, observers who’ve taken the long view have pointed out that we are sitting on two demographic time bombs. When the baby-boom generation retires, we will face a federal budget crisis like we’ve never seen before. Bush’s father (“Bush 41”) and Bill Clinton both put the government on a course to begin to deal with that problem by raising taxes, and sure enough by the end of Clinton’s term we had a growing budget surplus. The Social Security problem hadn’t been solved, but it looked like the government would have some of the tools it needs to handle it. Health care costs are the other time bomb; Clinton’s good-faith effort to deal with that crashed and burned, and Bush seems unwilling to open the necessary discussion on how to fix the broken system we’re left with.

So now we have deficits as far as the eye can see, and a president who thinks it’s more important to eliminate the taxes the rich pay on stock dividends than to keep the government in the black. When Social Security and Medicare start to founder — right about when people currently in their 40s start to retire — we’ll know who to thank. Unless, of course, someone who follows Bush in the White House has the backbone to raise taxes and undo Bush’s current mayhem — just as Bush’s father and Clinton had to undo Reagan’s.

When I was in school learning about the difference between an average (or mean), where you add up the values of a bunch of items and then divide by the number of items, and a median, where you line up a bunch of items and find the value of the one in the middle, I always thought the median was sort of meaningless. What practical use would it ever have?

Watching President Bush’s State of the Union tonight I thought, Oh, this is where medians come in handy.

I’m referring, of course, to the claim — repeated yet again in the president’s speech — that his tax cut plan offers an “average” tax break of over $1000. “Ninety-two million Americans,” Bush told us with a straight face, “will keep this year an average of almost $1,100 more of their own money.”

This average is a convenient fiction; it’s a statistic that exists only because the enormous benefits accruing to the dividend-owning super-rich skew the “average” — and camouflage the fact that the cuts most middle class taxpayers will receive under Bush’s proposal are piddling. The few rich taxpayers with mega-breaks are statistical “outliers”; if you used a median rather than an average you’d end up with a far lower number — one much closer to what most of us would actually get under Bush’s plan.

Now, this claim had already been widely debunked before the speech; I’m not breaking any news here. Paul Krugman put it most memorably when he wrote, “A liberal and a conservative were sitting in a bar. Then Bill Gates walked in. ‘Hey, we’re rich!’ shouted the conservative. ‘The average person in this bar is now worth more than a billion!'”

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked at this late date that Bush and his administration would continue to use blatantly misleading “facts” to sell their policies; it’s been their economic approach from day one. Still, it’s appalling. And the very consistency of Bush’s willingness to twist simple facts in demonstrably manipulative and sometimes outright deceitful ways has a more pernicious effect than simply discrediting his policies: It leaves us with the sense that the man is deeply untrustworthy.

I wouldn’t buy a used car from anyone who I knew played so fast and loose with simple arithmetic — let alone trust him on matters of life and death, war and peace. Unfortunately, the U.S. has already made its down payment.