January 03, 2005
A Grave And Gathering Danger
President Bush's allies are raising millions of dollars for an election-style campaign to promote private Social Security accounts... [...]
With Bush planning to unveil details of his Social Security plan this month, several GOP groups close to the White House are asking the same donors who helped re-elect Bush to pay for an extensive campaign to convince Americans -- and skeptical legislators -- that Social Security is in crisis and that private accounts are the cure.
Rule of thumb: any time you need to spend millions of dollars on a PR campaign to convince peers that they're facing a "crisis", they probably aren't.
Other likely contributors include the financial-services and securities industries and other Fortune 500 companies, GOP officials say.
Corollary to the rule of thumb: an entity which stands to gain from the "solution" to a "crisis" can probably be expected to contribute to the crisis-mongering PR campaign.
Update, 1/5/05: Paul Krugman explains the situation quite well.
Posted by Eddie Tews at January 3, 2005 07:37 PM
Comments
It may not necessarily be to convince them that there's a crisis, it may be to convince voters not to throw out any Republicans who vote to change Social Security, which has proven to be a risky thing to do in the past. -- Posted by: Jim on January 5, 2005 05:28 PM