I’m shocked, shocked that the White House would be trying to sell the new version of their Social Security as a plan to protect the poor and, get this, slash benefits for the “wealthy.” Which journalist do they have on the payroll now to help them sell that load of bull? Actually, the usual lambs of the press are dutifull reporting this nonsense.

Not Paul Krugman who, as usual, calls it right in today’s New York Times with a column called “A Gut Punch to the Middle.” As Krugman writes, the White House’s “progressive price indexing” is really “a plan to slash middle-class benefits; the wealthy would barely feel a thing.” The rich folks the White House seem not to care about are those folks making a whopping average of $37,000, who, Krugman writes, would face “a cut equal to 10 percent of pre-retirement income” if they retired in 2075.

Another piece worth reading from a few days ago comes from Roger Hickey over at the Campaign for America’s Future. Roger was one of the people who got out of the gate early when the flim-flam artists over at the White House started floating the “Social Security-is-in-crisis” garbage. In a column called Bush’s Snake Oil Plan, Roger aptly stresses a point I’ve made here before: “If they really wanted to call on wealthy Americans to sacrifice a little to make Social Security solvent for the poor and the middle class, Bush and his minions would embrace lifting the cap on incomes subject to the Social Security tax. Currently, Bill Gates and other millionaires pay payroll taxes on only their first $90,000—and nothing after that.”