State Treasurer Jonathan Miller and ABC News's George Stephanopolous have one very notable characteristic in common. Neither seems capable of telling the difference between a dollar that is an asset and one that is not.
Miller persists in his stupid claim that the money-losing KAPT scheme is backed up by more than $100 million in cash from liquidated unclaimed property. The reality of course is that there is no such money, no such fund, and the only surprise is that the mainstream media in Kentucky is so willfully blind to this simple truth. Perhaps they don't mind raising your taxes to fill the growing hole KAPT will require us to fill in future years. I do.
Stephanopolous looked like he was going to wet himself when he exclaimed, absurdly, that the President of the United States was "caught in a contradiction" by describing Social Security Trust Fund "dollars" as a filing cabinet full of IOU's and contending that personal accounts would include an option for nervous investors that would include all Treasury Bonds backed by the "full faith and credit of the USA." The difference is that the Social Security Trust Fund money has been spent (that makes it just like the KY unclaimed property "fund" if you are keeping score at home.) When money is gone, it can't honestly be counted as an asset. Surely they taught that to you at Harvard, Treasurer Miller. And it is a shame that Stephanopolous is too thick to see that President Bush just pulled the "gambling in the stock market" rug out from under the Democrats' feet. No doubt the New York Times and Washington Post slept through that one as well.
Democrats are mighty smug on this one right now. They had better hope that their electoral math is better than their financial math.
I'm so glad that President Bush mentioned that the GOP is clearly the party of ideas. Democrats are counting on ignorance in the voting public to stop their slide into oblivion. The numbers (as in the simple math) are on our side. We can only hope that the votes will be.
