Serious People having a Serious Debate

Paul Krugman, who has been on a serious tear as of late, wrote a post on a speech by Alan Simpson; the co-chair of American President Obama's debt commission,

Actually, the rude gesture (more detail, please?) was the least of it. If you follow the link, you’ll find Simpson repeating a whole series of zombie lies about Social Security. He repeats the idea that nobody collected benefits in the beginning because life expectancy at birth was only 63 (life expectancy at age 65, which is what matters, was almost 80 for women and 78 for men). He claims that nobody saw the future burden of the baby boomers, when the Greenspan commission reforms in the 1980s were all about precisely that. And on and on.

And when confronted with contrary numbers taken straight from the Social Security Administration, he claims that they’re left-wing fabrications.

He goes on to ask whether we should take the advice of people who apparently understand nothing about the subject in which they speak seriously.

There's two ways you can interpret Simpson's comments.  Either he actually doesn't understand anything about Social Security in the United States, or that he's simply lying to his audience on purpose.  Given that Simpson used to be a Senator from Wyoming I expect that he's simply lying about the subject, but you never know.  Regardless, this kind of strategy is classic strategy for attacks on the welfare state.  Parts of the American welfare state are in trouble, but it isn't Social Security, it's Medicare, which was the target of last year's land mark expansion of health care access.  In fact, if nothing is done about the Social Security 'crisis' in the United States, the program will be able to pay out all of its benefits until 2037; when it'll be forced to cut pay outs to 78% declining to 75% of pay outs after 2084.

Since there is no actual crisis in the American Social Security system, people like Simpson and other individuals/groups interested in destroying the welfare state have worked at inventing a crisis instead.  The manufacturing of the 'crisis' of Social Security is enabled by another manufactured 'crisis' with the spiraling of American public debt, which structurally is more a result of elite-driven tax cuts, rather than an actual problem with expenditures of the American government, even while waging two wars overseas.