Pantalones En El Fuego

... or something like that! It is bad enough that the Bush camp is going around telling blacks that they are getting gyp'ed by social security because they die earlier than whites, but his lie to the hispanic population is just flaming!

Blacks aren't the only Americans whose shorter life expectancies (compared with whites) are being used by the Bush administration to promote Social Security reform. The White House is claiming that Latinos should support changes to the system because they collect Social Security for fewer years, on average, than whites do. There are several problems with that line of thinking, but the biggest one, according to Slate political correspondent William Saletan, is this: It's a lie. A U.S. Census Bureau report shows that Latinos outlive whites by an average of three years, he noted last week. So has the administration changed its strategy since Saletan pointed out the error? Yes. "The White House no longer obliquely implies that Latinos die younger than whites do," Saletan reports. "It now repeats that falsehood explicitly."

At one of those infamous "town hall" meetings held this week in Nevada, Vice President Dick Cheney declared, "Life expectancy, for example, among African Americans and Hispanics is less than it is for others. They get a worse return, if you will, out of Social Security than others because they don't live long enough to draw the benefits that was equal what they've paid into the system over time. So it is an important consideration."

And the press has done little to debunk the myth, Haletan says. A story appearing this week in The Wall Street Journal reported, "For African-Americans ... [Republicans] argue that personal accounts offer a better deal; blacks' shorter life expectancy, the argument goes, means they collect traditional Social Security benefits for a shorter period and thus would help their families more with personal accounts they could leave to heirs. They argue that Hispanics would benefit for the same reason."