When (attempting to) think critically, you can't just choose to ignore the entire context. And when you're talking about both the kinds of sources and the orde

When (attempting to) think critically, you can't just choose to ignore the entire context. And when you're talking about both the kinds of sources and the order of magnitude or so difference, one estimate is not "just as useless". One estimate is based on the retelling of a made up number by some anonymous source accompanied, with other information that was verifiably not true. Friedman's estimate is based on real honest to god numbers produced by the accounting agency of the government in question minus an unknown amount. He did not mention the missing amount for SS, true. But given the context, I can see why he may have not -- it does't really matter when you're at least an order off [1]. Drawing a false equivalence here is not thinking critically. [1] The budget for the entire year for SS protection was 689M in 2008 [http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/resources/briefing/Patterson-Cost%20of%20WH.pdf http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/resources/briefing/Pa...].