Are the less informed easier to persuade than the more?

 

 

Lori Montgomery, Washington Post, Thursday, February 26, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/26/AR2009022600783_pf.html

 

President Obama will release a proposed budget today that sets aside up to $250 billion dollars to add to the existing bank bailout, which would bring the 2009 budget deficit to $1.75 trillion dollars…

 

The request Obama will deliver to Congress today proposes to provide what administration officials are calling a "down payment" on a major expansion of health care coverage for the uninsured.

 

It identifies $634 billion in tax increases and spending cuts to cover the cost of part of the program, but does not say how the administration hopes to raise the rest of the money -- hundreds of billions of dollars more. "TBD" has been penciled into categories for cost savings and benefit reductions.

 

White House officials said the addition of another $250 billion in the budget to shore up banks is considered a "placeholder," which the administration hopes not to have to spend, at least not in its entirety…

 

And though Obama told Congress on Tuesday that his budget team has "already identified $2 trillion in savings" to help tame record budget deficits, about half of those "savings" are actually tax increases, administration officials said.

 

A big chunk of the rest of the savings comes from measuring Obama's plans against an unrealistic scenario in which the Iraq war continues to suck up $170 billion a year forever…

 

…Obama pledged an end to "education programs that don't work," "direct payments to large agribusinesses," "no-bid contracts" in Iraq and "Cold War-era weapons systems we don't use."

 

…a senior administration official acknowledged yesterday that the budget does not contain $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. Instead, the figure represents Obama's total efforts at deficit reduction, including tax hikes on families making over $250,000 a year. It also includes hundreds of billions of dollars "saved" by not continuing to spend $170 billion a year in Iraq.

 

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts

foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values

 

For a nation afraid to let its people judge truth and falsehood

…is a nation afraid of its people

 

John F Kennedy