Social Security and Rove/Plame

Not related except by the fact that each shows how mendacious Bush administration offices are:

1. NY Times' Paul Krugman on Social Security's 70th birthday. Here is an interesting money quote from the article:

"Last week Jo Anne Barnhart, the commissioner of Social Security, published an op-ed article claiming that Social Security as we know it was designed for a society in which people didn't live long enough to collect a lot of benefits. 'The number of older Americans living now,' wrote Ms. Barnhart, 'is greater than anyone could have imagined in 1935.'

...

"(Yet,) the current number of older Americans as a share of the population is just about what the founders of Social Security expected. The 1934 report of F.D.R.'s Commission on Economic Security, which laid the groundwork for the Social Security Act, projected that 12.7 percent of Americans would be 65 or older by the year 2000. The actual number was 12.4 percent."

With a commissioner that stupid or dishonest about such a basic fact, is it any wonder that the commission consistently undervalues the gross domestic product in its analyses that, in turn, create doomsday scenarios that keep getting pushed back?

UPDATE: Here is Ms. Barnhart's contact information. I called the number there and learned she is "traveling" this week. I spoke with her communication director and gave her the Krugman citation and information. I also provided her information as to the trustees' dishonest method of calculating gross domestic product information. I said Ms. Barnhart would do well to attempt to respond to Krugman's article and that she should also explain how and why the trustees consistently undervalue the social security system's solvency when they are supposed to be trustees. Surprising to me, the communications director said she would ask Ms. Barnhart to contact me to discuss this when she returns. I'll be amazed if that happens, but I would love to speak to her about it.

2. This Village Voice article by reporter Murray Waas (an excellent investigative reporter with sources deep inside the Plame investigation) has me thinking that some of special prosecutor's chief lieutenants are now leaking specific information because they sense the Busheviks will never let this investigation go to indictment. They are hoping to release enough information to create enough momentum to support indictments of Rove, Libby, and folks up the line to "unindicted co-conspirators" Ashcroft and Bush himself.