As I mentioned previously, President Bush and his allies have spent quite a bit of time talking up the Social Security "crisis," characterizing the US Treasury Notes its trust fund holds as, for example, "Worthless IOUs." As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out, however, President Bush's most recent federal financial disclosure form, from May 2004, makes it clear that a large chunk of the President's assets are, or at least were as of not long ago, tied up in these worthless scraps of paper. The actual magnitude of this is hidden, however, by the disclosure form's mere ranges of value for each asset, but I took the time to add up the numbers.
It turns out, as you could in fact see for yourself (feel free to compare the disclosure form with my own rough Excel file), that these "worthless IOUs" make up at least 33%, and as much as 75%, of the president's total assets. Again, Josh's question: is Bush broke?
The answer should be obvious to the reader: these notes are not, in fact, worthless; however, Bush's rhetoric is disingenuous. And as an aside for those who are wondering, I used the minimum and maximum values for each entry in the form to obtain my numbers, except where accurate values were available. I left out the Henry G. Freeman, Jr. Trust (which gives $12,000 a year to the first lady, according to an accompanying note) and the value of whatever book deals the Bushes may have, and took his stake in LSTF, LLC, the logging concern, to be one-half of the reported value for the corporation.
The actual percentage of assets that these notes represent depends heavily on the actual value of Bush's Texas estate, which is reported only as between one and five million. If a better estimate of its value were available, I could make this answer considerably more precise.
And of course, the real question remains: when will the president be at all honest about what is actually going on here? Sadly, we probably all know the answer to that one, too.
Update: And to make this perfectly clear, Bush is being completely dishonest and incredibly irresponsible in his claim that bills backed by the US Government will ever be "worthless," since that would require a move of, well, earth-shaking proportions, economically speaking. Bankruptcy of the federal government is not something that we like to consider often. For more real analysis, you can read responses by Brad Setser, Matthew Yglesias, and Josh Marshall.