but you didn’t necessarily think it would come from someone as smart as Jacob Weisberg: an attempt to use Claude Allen’s alleged shoplifting as a metaphor for the Bush administration’s economic policies.

Just as a point of comparison, consider Bush’s Social Security proposal, which died on the vine in Congress last year. Bush wanted to create a system of private retirement accounts for future retirees. To create these accounts would have required him to divert $1 trillion or so from the Social Security Trust Fund, which pays for benefits for current and future retirees. Since Bush did not propose to reduce benefits, how was he going to make up the difference? By sauntering to the customer service desk and asking for his money back. In this case, the receipt was a bogus projection that the retirement funds invested in the stock market would grow so quickly that everyone would come out ahead.

Michael Kinsley recently said more or less the same thing about Bush’s Social Security plan. But Bush did indeed propose to cut future benefits–or, if you would prefer, to slow the growth of benefits–by trillions of dollars. That’s what “progressive indexing” was about. The notion that the president’s plan depended for its financing on a “bogus projection” about stock-market returns is inaccurate.