From ''Little black lies'' by Paul Krugman
Social Security privatization really is like tax cuts, or the Iraq war: The administration keeps on coming up with new rationales, but the plan remains the same. President Bush's claim that we must privatize Social Security to avert an imminent crisis has evidently fallen flat. So now he's playing the race card.
This week, in a closed meeting with African-Americans, Bush asserted that Social Security was a bad deal for their race, repeating his earlier claim that ''African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people.'' In other words, blacks don't live long enough to collect their fair share of benefits.
This isn't a new argument; privatizers have been making it for years. But the claim that blacks get a bad deal from Social Security is false. And Bush's use of that false argument is doubly shameful, because he's exploiting the tragedy of high black mortality for political gain instead of treating it as a problem we should solve.
