Insouciance

New Heritage Online says to be n-ss-nt is to have blithe unconcern or nonchalance. It comes from the French word soucier--to trouble--further stolen from Latin's sollicitare, to vex.  With the in- part added afterwards, of course.

One reason why the two of us here agree on a lot: neither of us likes being lied to, especially when it's a poor, demonstrably-disprovable-without-much-effort kind of lie.  The kind of statement you can swiftly google into a pure falsehood or even  a blatant 180, just bugs the crap out of me.  It has only two explanations: daftness of the highest order, or Machiavellian engineering Machiavelli was too classy to stoop to. It's like he or she is daring you to try and catch the lie, and see if it makes any damn difference to anybody.  George Bush has been wearing a "see if anyone cares and then call me" smirk since four Januaries prior.  How does he do it? Insouciance.

People are recently more engaged, more passionate, more informed (in the rawest sense, on quantity not quality) and more attuned than since the last dark-tunnel US war.  Ironically rather than dispel insouciance, I think that heightened energy has fostered it, in an especially dangerous side effect: at least for supporters of the President,  Americans are not altogether concerned with what he is saying, just as long as it seems like he's got some idea of what he wants to do. I think it's often a practiced insouciance, which we might more properly call cognitive dissonance, but there's a seeming lack of concern among people that they have any dissonance at all.

Listen closely to those writers who have noticed that the plan for selling Social Security reform is being approached in much the same way as was the war on Iraq, and notice the common reason: they're passing a line of complete BS on both the current facts and the outcome--overscary on one hand, and overpromised on the other.  You could play target practice with the unknown or released but foggy details, and that's essentially what the Democrats are apparently planning to do: swordfight over policy numbers while the entire philosophy of the argument shifts away from them.  As Mary Kay Place read so well in the film The Rainmaker, "You must be stupid, stupid, stupid."

So I think Josh Marshall's underpinning of the entire substantive argument is an excellent framing that exposes the core untruths being propagated by the administration.  Whatever you think of the merits of retained SS payments for private investment, from a practical standpoint this is our situation:

...about $3 trillion of those dollars we needed to fund the 1980s and 1990s deficits we managed to borrow closer to home. We borrowed it from the Social Security (and a few other government) trust fund(s). Almost the entirety of President Bush's Social Security phase-out plan comes down to a simple proposition: finding out how not to pay it back.

The proper frame for those opposed to the President's apparent intent is not that privatization is risky, or that the existing funding problem is not really a big problem yet or at all.  People understand investment is risky; they get the risk-reward equation, and risk does not scare them. And people are not too dumb to know that more old people plus fewer workers means some slack somewhere has to be picked up.  Just because people are insouciant, does not make them ignorant or dumb. What makes them insouciant to what is in essence simple pandering via false advertising, is that the frame is agreeable to them.  Risk is part of entrepreneurship, and reforming government handout schemes always sounds like a good idea, even if they're pretty much the most effective government handout scheme in civilized history.

No, the proper frame for this total con job is that it's going to kill us financially now, and it only adds to the problem.  We are not underpaying, we are overborrowing--and obviously $2 trillion in more borrowing is not the solution.  The country simply must be clued into the fact that we've had a plan to save Social Security since 1983, and it's only any kind of issue at all because WE SPENT THAT MONEY ALREADY.  And thus borrowing a bunch more not only doesn't pay it back, it usually makes it worse.  The only way to defeat George Bush's desires on Social Security is to identify the transition costs as Bad Money. It's one or two trillion bucks; the public will be aware of the price tag--and to the extent they're not, Democrats and others better make damn sure they're mentioning it.  If that money can be labeled as "not going to fix the problem," then arguing over whether there's a problem at all is pointless--even if there was, this won't fix it. One stone, two birds.

-TJ