Cheney’s ironic lecture on the peril of debt

March 3, 2006

Dick Cheney seems to believe he’s in a position to lecture on the importance of fiscal responsibility.

Vice President Dick Cheney urged Americans Thursday to do a better job of saving and challenged policymakers to strengthen pensions and fix Social Security to help people in their golden years.

“The American dream begins with saving money and that should begin on the very first day of work,” Cheney told a conference here exploring how to encourage people to boost savings and be better prepared for retirement.

Too often, workers are living paycheck to paycheck and are not saving sufficiently, Cheney said. Last year, Americans’ personal savings rate dropped to its lowest point since the Great Depression.

There are a couple of ways to consider this. One is to point out that it’s easy for Cheney to say this; he’s a millionaire. Another is to note that wages since Bush took office haven’t grown in a way that makes it possible for the typical family to save as much as they’d like.

But for me, I like the irony angle. Right around the time the Vice President urged the nation to budget responsibly and plan ahead through savings, Congress heard a slightly different take on national savings from the Bush administration.

Treasury officials told Congress that the government needed to increase the $8.2-trillion national debt by another $781 billion to meet expenses.

“During this administration, America’s debt, that is the total of the deficits, has increased by $3 trillion,” said Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee. “That’s a 40% increase in the entire federal debt accrued by our country in its entire history.”

And Dick “deficits don’t matter” Cheney believes he has the credibility to tell Americans they’re not saving enough?

Ownership society… we own you.

  • How anyone takes this man seriously I will never know. And it’s one thing to be a millionaire who earned his millions through hard work, and another to be like this man who has lied, cheated and stolen his way to them. He would be a great Dickens character.

  • Obviously he has no clue about the financial principles underpinning his statements. If lack of savings is a problem for households, he is basically saying that expenditures in retirement are going to be greater than income plus the spending down of any assets. Perhaps he should apply this approach to the lack of savings the government is doing. At least with households, the people die, so eventually the ride is over and the mistakes made are cleaned up and the balance sheet zeroed up. But the governements debts dont go away, unless you inflate them away, or you default and at the rate we are piling up debts in relatively good times, we have huge trouble ahead. We cant stop spending on Iraq, and we have a demographic driven wave of entitlement spending that is going to crush the budget. So perhaps what he is implying here, quite simply is, we arent planning on doing anything but dissaving, so you better save, because the income you expected in retirement that isnt from your own assets (read Soc Sec) isnt going to be there. This is just more code for dismantling the social safety net. Nothing new.

  • His statments are also interesting in light of the GOPs refusal to raise the minimum wage. Folks who earn the minimum wage, and there are a whole lot fo them, are supposed to “save” when they haven’t received a raise for over 10 years now (maybe more). Cheney really is the lowest of the low, and makes me really hope that there is a heaven and hell.

  • I assume this is a true story but how he could talk about fiscal responsibility with a straight face (which I assume he did) is a mystery. The other myster is why he wasn’t laughed/hounded out of the room.

  • Hey CB,

    What fradulent group organized the “2006 National Summit on Retirement Savings” at which Cheney gave his speech, along with other Republican cronies (Don Evans & Elaine Chao)?

    Hey ET,

    You wondered:

    The other mystery is why he wasn’t laughed/hounded out of the room.

    If CB can the above question, your “other” mystery might be solved.

  • Actually this is a pretty legit conference, normally. They hold it every four years, and the data is largely drawn from the EBRI( Employee Benefits Research Institute). I’ve looked at a lot of their data for my job, and it’s really not bad stuff. However, it looks as though the conference had to through in some political fluff when the keynote speakers were on of which cheney was one.. Cheney has no business speaking at this event whatsoever. Its pure propaganda to make it look like he has something to do other than snoop and start wars.

    http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/pdf/2006agenda.pdf

  • we should also note that the bush administration is, by its own account, stealing the social security surplus (since bush regards the i.o.u.s as worthless) to make the deficit look better than it is.

    in fact, they’ve added another (i’d have to look it up) roughly $500B – $1T to the deficit than these numbers show us.

  • The little thief hopes the locks trunks are weak so he can break into them.
    The big thief hopes the locks on trunks are strong so they won’t spill open when hauling them away. (from Chuang Tzu)

    “The American dream begins with saving money and that should begin on the very first day of work,” …and lock it away in your trunk.

  • G2000,

    Are you suggesting that Bush’s Department of Labor is above giving government events a political spin? Bush’s track record is fairly poor when comes to “hijacking” the federal government for political purposes. What comes to mind is when the Republican hack leaders of Bush’s DOJ overruled career DOJ attorneys and approved Tom DeLay’s reapportionment plan for the state of Texas. Or, when true cost of the Medicare Drug Plan (Part D) was suppressed by a threat to fire the person in the know.

  • Slip, definitely not. Spin is what the administration is all about. The DOL itself isnt a bad group, but the leadership under Chao has been politicized and I dont know how much the team there has become demoralized in the last few years, or how much the work they are doing has suffered. She’s basically a hack, but with her at the head, you can be assured of some nonsense keynoters, such as Cheney being put on the bill. And yes, they have a poor record on the hijacking front, but they can wrench political arms long enough to get what they want, then keep the truth from coming out until at least 6 to 12 months later, when most people have forgotten, and of course, release the truth on a friday evening, hoping it will go unnoticed.

  • Living from paycheck to paycheck, while I’m spending their social security money?! How can they hope to retire?! –Dick
    What, are there no work houses? –Scrooge

  • And don’t forget that Cheney is an original member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which advocated in its 2000 white paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, that the U.S. government should drastically increase military spending in order to enhance “America’s global leadership” in the 21st century.

    So what does the Bush-Cheney administration do? Increase spending while cutting taxes. Or, in everyday person-on-the-street terms, they took a lower paying job and went out and bought extravagant items on credit. Doesn’t sound terribly fiscally responsible, now, does it?

    http://www.newamericancentury.org/

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