1. It's no surprise they'd distort, obscure, conceal. Look at what they removed this year from the Trustees' Report on Social Security and Medicare (in lieu of speaking and acting to rescue or reform these two programs):

“It is noteworthy that over the past four decades, the average amount of total Federal revenues as a percentage of GDP has also been 18 percent, and has never exceeded 21 percent in a given year. Assuming the continued need to fund a wide range of other government functions, the projected growth in Social Security and Medicare costs would require that the total Federal revenue share of GDP increase to wholly unprecedented levels.”

That omission (removal) was no accident.

2. Sugar-coating: Consider not only the source of such tactics, but the destination (specific people).

(Sugar-coating what bad news isn't withheld or otherwise kept away, instead, that is.)

After all, these are the same people who refuse time after time to act to save Social Security and Medicare (and in fact, want to rob robotically from Medicare as part of “paying for” universal-incrementalist health care “reform”).

The nicest thing I saw in this article is the admission that Democrats will, indeed, increase taxes after the economy improves. Maybe that's why they've been sugar-coating the economic numbers. So they can raise the taxes sooner.

It would be funnier, if it weren't true.

The date 2013 is to extend the death-by-doldrum kill of the Public Option. The final blow will take very little, will come via a series of invisible dismantling until the public forgets all about it and it dies a death of attrition.

The trigger is the same as the Public Option being totally defeated.

Trigger = No Public Option. To put it in instant terms.