A Stitch in Haste

Well not really, but he easily could have:

President Bush on Tuesday used a four-drawer filing cabinet stuffed with paper representing government IOUs that he said symbolized the Social Security trust fund’s bleak outlook for meeting Americans’ future retirement needs.

“A lot of people in America think there is a trust -- that we take your money in payroll taxes and then we hold it for you and then when you retire, we give it back to you,” Bush said in a speech at the University of West Virginia at Parkersburg.

“But that’s not the way it works,” Bush said. “There is no trust ‘fund’ — just IOUs that I saw firsthand,” Bush said.

Neat. I blogged about the "Trust Fund" vault filing cabinet here.

For better or worse, this is the kind of theatrics the Administration is going to have to engage in more often to sell Social Security reform. Between the flood of lies from opponents of Social Security to the wishy-washy timidity of Congressional Republicans, no wonder the push for reform is foundering. If the President needs a dog-and-pony show to get the message across, then so be it.

Perhaps next up the President should stage a photo op with survivors of people who died right before they qualified for Social Security benefits, telling the stories of how much their deceased loved ones paid in Social Security taxes, only to get zero benefits because they died too soon. And then slide into a discussion of what would happen with private accounts. I think that would be very effective if done tastefully.