Saletan: Bush Lying About Latino Life Expectancies
According to William Saletan at Slate, Bush and cohorts are telling an outright lie to Latino audiences in an effort to get them to support privatized Social Security accounts: Se habla B.S.? – The White House lies about Latinos and Social Security.
Saletan offers a link to a U.S. Census report containing the following table: Projected Life Expectancy at birth by Race and Hispanic Origin, 1999 to 2100. That table seems to show pretty clearly that while blacks’ life expectancy generally is less than that of non-Latino whites, every other ethnic group (including Latinos) beats us white folk.
So, whatever merit there is in Bush’s argument that non-whites get a worse “deal” from Social Security because they die sooner than whites, it would seem to apply only to blacks, not to Latinos. And since Saletan called them on this point a week ago, you’d think the Bush people would stop saying it applies to Latinos. But as recently as a couple of days ago, Cheney said at a town-hall-style meeting, “Life expectancy, for example, among African Americans and Hispanics is less than it is for others.”
Well, but that’s Cheney. Everyone knows he’s a shameless motherfucker when it comes to lying with a straight face.
Whatever. Back to the Terri Schiavo deathwatch.
March 24th, 2005 at 7:02 pm
Terri Schiavo’s getting a pretty raw deal on social security.
March 25th, 2005 at 5:20 am
It’s all that white guilt that’s killing us so early. I guess I can eat as much fried food as I want to and still live forever!
March 28th, 2005 at 12:15 pm
The life expectancy of all of us dropped on November 2/04. No matter what race, we all be fuct.