The Sky Will Fall In 2016

Social Security is in trouble. But why are Bush's experts making the problem seem worse than it is?

Blue-ribbon presidential commissions fall into two very different personality groups. Type A commissions are made up of reasonable people who disagree about some complicated problem and then struggle to reach consensus. These folks spend months in tortuous public hearings, draft carefully hedged reports, and often wind up utterly deadlocked. Type B panels avoid that outcome by being rigged from the start--stacked with people who already agree on What Is to Be Done yet still go through the motions of assessing the problem. Their final reports are clear and sweeping but usually dead on arrival, because all the opponents who were cut...

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