Fuzzy Math

Cragg Hines of the Houston Chronicle takes a look at Bush's mathematical magic

Almost half — 47 percent — of those questioned in a survey for the Washington Post, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University believe that Social Security has major problems but is not in crisis. (The survey is the product of 1,236 randomly selected adults nationwide interviewed Feb. 3-6 and another 1,231 interviews Feb. 4-6).

Even if the president is correct in his dire predictions, perception being reality in politics, public doubts will make it difficult for Bush to press what would be historic revisions of the iconic plan through Congress.

What's to blame for this credibility gap, the chasm between the president's repeated cries that the sky is falling and the public's refusal to buy it?

Could it be the administration's penchant for numeric funny business? Say, a budget that omits future funding for the occupation of Iraq or the financing of Bush's proposed semi-privatization of the Social Security system. And those doozies are just a couple of things that have been left out of or fudged in a single document.

The White House has gone from "fuzzy math" (Bush's description of Al Gore's figuring in the 2000 presidential debates) to math that is so indistinct and imprecise as to resemble the matted coat of some extinct quadruped.

That's it. We have arrived in the fiscal realm of the wooly mammoth.

Even the president's own party has been had. In the last week we've learned that the Medicare prescription drug plan, instead of costing $400 billion over 10 years (2004-2013, a period that included two years when the plan was not to be up and running) will cost $720 billion (2006-2015, the first decade of its actual operation).

The conservative Heritage Foundation offered a quiz on the point: "Question: How much money will it cost taxpayers to give all Medicare patients prescription drug coverage over the next 10 years? Answer: Depends on which 10 years."