Dark Bilious Vapors

KTK over at LeanLeft weighs in on the latest by George "I'm a buffoon" Bush:

George Bush, in an unbelievably irresponsible and dishonest act, has been doing everything he can to undermine public belief that the US government will honor its bond debt. Luckily, everyone who matters knows he’s lying - because if anyone took him seriously, the result would be the collapse of the US, and likely the world’s, economy.

Why would he take such a terrifyingly stupid risk? To destroy Social Security, of course.

Those “i.o.u.’s” are government bonds - guarantees of payment with interest issued for money lent to the US government. They are widely regarded as the most secure investment instruments in the world - but only because they are “backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government,” which is to say the willingness of the government to honor its legal debts and pay back the money. The bonds held by the Social Security program - which is to say the money paid into Social Security by generations of workers to build up a positive balance for when the long drawdown for the Boomer generation begins, and which was confiscated by the Bush Administration to counter its expenses from the Iraq war, military buildup, and tax breaks for the rich - are the very same bonds held by foreign governments (and millions of American citizens and investment firms) in return for money they also invested in our government. Claiming that those bonds are “worthless” - and implying that his administration, which incurred that debt by stealing the surplus that had been carefully built up under Bush Sr. and Clinton, will refuse to pay off the bonds that they themselves issued - is a declaration that an entire worldfull of investors and foreign governments, who hold trillions of dollars of US debt, have all lost their money. Wiping out the entire world’s investments in America would simply destroy those countries’ economies, bankrupt billions of people, send the dollar into the basement, and end forever foreign countries’ willingness to accept US monetary (or political) guarantees. But none of this will actually happen, because everyone involved in real finance knows that (a) Bush is lying outright, and (b) the real thinkers are not so stupid as to allow him to actually repudiate the US national debt and put this nation on a financial footing with the most corrupt, bankrupt Third World countries on the map.

It’s gotten to this point: the President is such a buffoon that he now bases his own major policies on the fact that everyone knows he’s lying; he openly expects that no one will take him seriously and on that ground deliberately says things that would be disastrous if they were said by anyone who could be believed or respected enough to imagine that his statements reflected his intended behavior.

Len on 04.08.05 @ 01:33 PM CST