EDITOR'S LETTER

We Got a Whole Lot of Trouble...

t could reasonably be said that President George W. Bush has become the Harold Hill of American politics. Hill, you will recall, was the booming central figure of Meredith Willson's The Music Man—a. traveling salesman who peddled band instruments and uniforms to schools and communities. His use of scare tactics regarding the local pool hall to rally the townsfolk of River City into organizing a boys' band was inspired. And it worked. "Either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community." It's one thing to hoodwink townspeople into buying instruments and uniforms they don't really need. It's another thing altogether to produce trumped-up reasons for invading Iraq, or to employ boogeyman fright tactics to stir up support for a plan to privatize Social Security. Where Hill would say, "That game with the 15 numbered balls is the Devil's tool!," the president will bray that Social Security is going broke and going broke fast.

In reality, Social Security has brought in $ 1.7 trillion more over the past two decades than it has paid out. So there is a surplus. The 2004 annual Social Security trustees report said that the program could pay out the existing level of benefits until 2042, after which time it would be able to handle 73 percent of the currently scheduled benefits. As crises go, there are greater ones on the horizon. So why would the president spend so much political capital on such a non-issue? Perhaps because privatizing a portion of the country's Social Security taxes could funnel billions of dollars into the hands of big banks and brokerages, two major categories of donors to the Republican campaign war chest. As David Langer, a specialist in retirement-benefit planning, wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, "Assuming 2 percent of workers' taxable pay goes into individual accounts, the financial community's gross income could be augmented by more than $100 billion in the next decade and escalate rapidly from there."

lobal wanning, on the other hand, is a looming problem of terrifying proportions. Sir David King, the British government's chief scientific adviser, wrote in the journal Science that it poses a greater threat to the world than terrorism. "As the world's only remaining superpower;" he added, "the United States is accustomed to leading internationally coordinated action. But at present the U.S. government is failing to take up the challenge of global warming." A Pentagoncommissioned report in 2003 envisioned catastrophic consequences as a "plausible" result of global warming—which is produced largely by the burning of fossil fuels—as early as 2020. The report forecast seas submerging low-lying cities in Europe and Japan, "Siberian" temperatures for Britain, and worldwide famine—all starting within the next 15 years. What does the White House do? Not much. It refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which requires cuts in greenhouse gases. And, when pressed, the administration prefers not to use the expression global warming, opting for the more benign wording "climate change."

here is this fellow named Allen Carr. Not the caftan-wearing proI ducer of Grease and Can't Stop the Music—but, rather, a former I accountant who has made a name for himself in Europe over the past 22 years with his program to help people quit smoking. Sessions can last six hours, at which point attendees expect to re-enter the world as useful, rehabilitated citizens. An associate of Carr's said the other day that he would like to establish an American beachhead in New ''fork. One would think that an anti-smoking zealot like our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, would welcome the group with open arms. Quite the opposite, I'm afraid. Because participants are permitted to smoke for the first four hours of the six-hour sessions, the instructor is subjected to secondhand smoke and the program is therefore illegal in this city. So welcome to post-logical New ''fork, where we have reached a stage of lunacy in which it is not only illegal to run an establishment where people can smoke—it's illegal to run one that tries to stop them from smoking.

GRAYDON CARTER