I don’t buy the new version of your argument, either, Jerry, since 1) you assume that a large Medicare bill of some sort was avoidable and I don’t, and 2) you ignore Bush’s endorsement of progressive price indexing. But my original point was that your original claim — that Bush didn’t expend any political capital to curb entitlement spending — was false. I take your refusal to support this claim to constitute a tacit abandonment of it, and our remaining differences aren’t all that important.