Rick Perry’s Social Security Tourette syndrome -- "Ponzi scheme...criminal enterprise...broken..."

[jefferson_dem]

Rick Perry’s Social Security Tourette syndrome
By Greg Sargent

Ever since Rick Perry referred to Social Security multiple times as a “Ponzi scheme,” a number of commentators and GOP establishment figures have been asking themselves: Is he really comparing the popular entitlement program to a criminal enterprise?

Now Perry has elaborated on his views in an interview with Time magazine, and in it, he flirted with describing Social Security in precisely those terms, using that exact language:

There may be someone who is an established Republican who circulates in the cocktail circuit that would find some of my rhetoric to be inflammatory or what have you, but I’m really talking to the American citizen out there. I think American citizens are just tired of this political correctness and politicians who are tiptoeing around important issues. They want a decisive leader. I’m comfortable that the rhetoric I have used was both descriptive and spot on. Calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme has been used for years. I don’t think people should be surprised that terminology would be used...

I don’t get particularly concerned that I need to back off from my factual statement that Social Security, as it is structured today, is broken. If you want to call it a Ponzi scheme, if you want to say it’s a criminal enterprise, if you just want to say it’s broken — they all get to the same point. We need, as a country, to have an adult conversation. Don’t try to scare the senior citizens and those who are on Social Security that it’s somehow going to go away with the mean, old heartless Republican.

Let’s unpack this a bit. First, Perry’s self-styled straight talk about Social Security is anything but straight. Social Security is not “broken.” As Kevin Drum noted recently, Social Security has a “small, short-term funding shortfall” that can be “fixed easily.” The irony here is that in accusing critics of his reckless rhetoric of trying to scare senior citizens, Perry himself is doing exactly that. Perry didn’t quite call Social Security a “criminal enterprise,” but his analogy is absurdly, almost pathologically, flawed.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/rick-perrys-social-security-tourette-syndrome/2011/03/03/gIQAIvAeUK_blog.html

[Sheepshank]

1. Perry can attempt to walk this one back as much as he wants.

But it was a biggie, he repeated it...he put it in writing and doubled down at the debated on that meme. This load of crap cannot be pushed back into the bull...it's out and it stinks and it's staying out and it will continue to stink.