How ironic. A close friend of mine -- who happens to be stridently right-wing -- reads this blog and often accuses me of being alarmist. The fact is it's GW/Rove who use fear and end-of-the-world rhetoric to scare the public into going along with the administration's wishes. They did it with the lead-up to Iraq, they did it with the lead-up to this last election, and most recently, they're doing it with Social Security.

Paul Krugman wrote yesterday,

Last week someone leaked a memo written by Peter Wehner, an aide to Karl Rove, about how to sell Social Security privatization. The public, says Mr. Wehner, must be convinced that "the current system is heading for an iceberg."

It's the standard Bush administration tactic: invent a fake crisis to bully people into doing what you want.

Their bottom line belief: use whatever means necessary to obtain the desired end(s), period. One has to wonder where the born-again, virtuous tendencies enter into the equation (or could that too be just means to an end?).

As he's been doing in his column for weeks now, Krugman lets it be known that there is no crisis regarding SS -- certainly not anywhere near the degree that Bush will have us believe. It's all alarmist BS. As I wrote on Dec. 11, if SS needs any reform at all (and again, that's up for debate), the change that makes the most sense to me -- and will do wonders to the fiscal health of SS -- is to increase the age of eligibility. Thanks to progress, life expectancy has increased by 13% since 1950, or 9 years, and yet this achievement has not been applied to SS. Even increasing the age by just half of 9 would amount to astonishing actuarial cures.

Nope, better to scare the public with the aim of throwing billions to corporate interests.