[Mb-civic] EDITORIAL When Math Is Worse Than Fuzzy

[Michael Butler]

 The New York Times
February 10, 2005
EDITORIAL
When Math Is Worse Than Fuzzy

Whenever the Bush administration wants to sell a costly new program, look
carefully before you accept any numbers it puts out. The math isn't just
fuzzy, as the current euphemism would have it - it is often downright
misleading, and deliberately so.

The latest example is the newly acknowledged cost of the Medicare
prescription drug bill, which the administration bulled through Congress in
late 2003 over the objections of conservatives who railed that the price tag
would be too high. The number that had deficit hawks choking then was a
projection that the drug benefit would cost $400 billion over 10 years, from
2004 through 2013. The administration already had an internal estimate that
the cost would exceed $500 billion for that period. But it made sure to
suppress that figure as it strong-armed Republicans who had already approved
irresponsible tax cuts and an expensive war in Iraq, whose true costs were
also being hidden.

Now it turns out that the earlier discrepancy was small beer compared with
the latest upsurge in the projected 10-year cost of the drug benefit. As
pointed out in an article yesterday by Robert Pear in The Times, the drug
benefit is actually expected to cost some $720 billion over the first 10
years, from 2006, when the benefit kicks in, through 2015. The previous
numbers were lower because they included in the 10-year projections two
years when the program would not yet be up and running.

The higher numbers are bound to infuriate conservative Republicans who feel
that they were bullied into supporting an expansion of Medicare despite
their deep misgivings. But even those of us who supported the Medicare drug
benefit as a needed modernization of the program have a right to feel duped.
Congress went out of its way to deny Medicare officials the right to
negotiate for lower drug prices from manufacturers. That was a mistake when
the costs were projected at $400 billion. It is doubly disastrous at $720
billion.

The administration is trying a similar dodge in its efforts to sell the idea
of converting part of Social Security to private accounts. Those accounts
are a bad idea on the merits, but even many who might be inclined to support
them are fearful of the enormous transition costs, which could exceed a
trillion dollars over the first 10 years of the program. So the
administration has conjured up a more palatable number. By delaying the new
accounts until 2009, it is able to project that costs over the 10-year
period from 2006 until 2015 will be $754 billion. That presents less of a
target than a trillion-dollar bull's-eye, but all it does is delay the real
accounting.

Any resemblance to pronouncements on Iraq is probably not coincidental. The
administration repeatedly low-balled estimates of the number of troops who
would be needed to pacify the country, and it contended that Iraq would be
able to pay for postwar rebuilding with oil revenues, implying that the
costs to American taxpayers would be minimal. Now that the bills are
escalating and our troops are straining to contain the insurgency, those
glib assurances look like just another misleading sales pitch.

We're with the fiscal watchdogs in Congress in believing that these budget
numbers just aren't sustainable. Americans have to choose. We can have a
social safety net that protects our retired citizens from poverty and makes
sure they can afford adequate health care. Or we can have a small government
with a tax code that has a 1950's mentality in protecting the wealth of the
richest Americans at the expense of the middle class and the working poor.
We would prefer the first. Some conservatives may prefer the second. But Mr.
Bush, in trying to have it both ways, is going to undermine the nation's
longstanding social contract with workers and the elderly. The
deficit-addicted government that he has created doesn't have enough money
coming in to pay for the programs that the public wants and deserves, not to
mention the nation's defense.

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