Monday, January 31, 2005

Stupid is as Stupid Does

Jesse has a bit of fun with Luskin's latest idiocy, but let me address the profound stupidity of this passage:

And Bush is right — according to the National Center for Health Statistics, at age 65 the median African American male lives 14.6 more years, compared with 16.6 more years for whites. That means African Americans have 2 fewer years to collect their Social Security benefits than whites do, even though they pay the same amount of taxes during their working lives.

Uh, no. "African Americans" don't have 2 fewer years to collect. The African-American male who survives the median time after 65 has 2 fewer years to collect than the white male who survives the median time after 65. And, unless these people had exactly the same lifetime salary profile they didn't "pay the same amount in taxes." If we're kind to Luskin and acknowledge that we know what he probably meant, he's still wrong -- on average African-Americans don't pay the same amount of taxes during their working lives as do white Americans.

And, of course, at some point he dropped the "male." Regularly overlooked in all of this is even if we buy the bogus claim that social security is a bad deal for African-American males because they don't live as long as white males, it's important to remember that African-American females have a higher life expectancy at birth than white males, and only a couple of years lower life expectancy than the entire white population.