Notoriously Unreliable

I felt like I was in some kind of weird alternative universe a la Star Trek this morning as I read my local paper the Indianapolis Star. Just below an AP story describing how President Bush is now proposing INCREASING funding for the NEA (oh if I had the time to blog about that one today) were two pieces on the new government estimates for what the Bush prescription drug benefit is really going to cost.

OK, no one really believed the benefit was going to cost a mere 400 billion dollars, but the sort of stunning indifference to the gross understatement of cost by the White House from veteran politicians, such as Indiana's senior Senator Richard Lugar, in this report on the bill's true cost made me wonder what exactly conservatives stand for these days. Lugar describes early estimates of a government program's cost as"notoriously unreliable." Why not just say"always waaaaaaaay low?" A billion here for bad art, a billion for the drug companies.......

So we know the right has completely sold out, but what of the left who complained that this bill didn't do enough to help out America's poor helpless seniors? This argument has to be one of the most frustrating for me as a political scientist. The data on this point are crystal clear. Even if you believe that government transfers to eliminate problems are the way to go (and I do not) this additional plum to seniors is over the top.

Since the implementation of social security during the New Deal there's no doubt that the poverty rate among seniors has declined, although it's an open question whether or not government transfers or overall wealth creation are the cause of this. However one little fact ignored by everyone is that poverty among children has not shrunk. In fact there are now almost four times as many children below the poverty line in this country as there are seniors. If liberals really believe that we need to spend this money to help people, then why not give it America's 12 million children in poverty? Could it be that seniors vote at slightly higher rates then grammar school students?

Conservatives are engaging in naked political manipulation to try to win the votes of senior citizens by continuing to lavish pork on them. Liberals are either in denial if they believe these programs need to pay them even more or fighting a losing battle with conservatives to court votes in an election. I'll let you pick which one you think is correct.