An excellent Jonathan Kaplan article in The Hill notes that when privatization maestro Edward Prescott tried to sell the Treasury Department's professional economists on phase-out "as part of the department’s effort to build support for its plan in academia and on Capitol Hill," the economists told Prescott that lots of the things the administration's been saying about Social Security are, to put it bluntly, untrue. Kaplan also makes the point that this is part of a larger pattern, just one more step in the development of the postmodern presidency as someone once put it.