Seriousness Gap

How does The Globe compute Pawlenty's moderate record as Minnesota's Governor with the fact that he's gone way off the deep end of conservative nuttery since angling for the Republican Presidential nomination?  How can you consider this phony a serious candidate for the Presidency?

Hat tip to Impolitical.

Conservatives have no credibility in regards to the Senate

Conservatives, especially of the populist Western variety, have argued that democratic reforms are needed in order to 'shed the elitist and corrupt character' of the Canadian Senate.  Since the 1980s there have been two 'elected' Senators nominated to the Senate; Stanley Waters, nominated to the Senate in 1990 and Bert Brown in 2007.  Both of them were nominated from Alberta.  Since then the Tories under Harper since 2006 have completed ignored the idea of promoting an elected Senate in Canada by nominating 38 Conservatives to the Senate in total, including three more today.

In a gift to Layton, Harper decided to nominate defeated House of Commons candidates Larry Smith, Fabian Manning and Josee Verner to the Senate.  The optics of the Conservatives' press release are terrible.  It states that the "government will continue to push for a more democratic, accountable and effective Senate".  To which Layton and the NDP predictably replied that "there's nothing democratic about appointing three people who were rejected by voters three weeks ago."  How does one compute those statements in a way that accepts the Conservative perspective?  Conservatives in the past could rightfully point at the Liberals and correctly argue that they also indulged in such abuses of the Senate, muddying the waters as they did during the 'in-and-out' scandal; they can't make such defenses with the NDP in opposition.

Adam Radwanski over at The Globe and Mail thinks that this issue of nominating failed Senate candidates is potentially a pretty nasty narrative running against the Conservatives out in Western Canada.  Possibly, but I've been cynical about conservatives' vision for the Senate for a while.  In particular I think that they view the Senate as a mechanism for the institutionalization of conservatism in Canadian federal governance; in particular through creating a new veto point for left-wing legislation.  There's certainly a 'western' element to Canadian conservatives' view of the Senate's role as well.  Western conservatives feel that an elected Senate could yield a solid voting block of Senators who can prevent the sort of 'abuses' that Central Canada has 'inflicted' on the West.  The visceral loathing of Pierre Trudeau and his National Energy Policy comes to mind in this regard.

The example of the United States is the best way of analyzing the effects of 'balancing' representation by provinces in the upper house and making it 'effective' and 'equal'.  Small states tend to yield particularist Senators who are easily bought and paid for by capital eager to make a massive 'return' on its 'investments' in political elections.  These Senators thus act as a conservative bloc that denies liberal Democrats the capacity to bring sweeping changes to the country through the legislative process by blocking or watering down bills.  The best tool in the US Senate at the moment is the abuse of the filibuster; forcing all legislation to obtain 60 votes in order to pass a cloture motion has been a godsend for conservatives who feared that the election of Barack Obama would yield another round of sweeping liberal legislation.  Considering the challenges, it's a bit of a miracle that the Obama Administration was able at all to pass any sort of health care reform that didn't act as a buck-naked give away to the private health care industry.

Recounts

There's four recounts resulting from the elections on the second of May:

• NDP candidate Francois Lapointe was declared winner by just eleven votes over incumbent Conservative MP Bernard Genereux in Montagny-L'Islet-Kamouraska-Riviere-du-Loup.
• Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux retained his Winnipeg North seat over NDPer Rebecca Blaikie by 44 votes.
• In Northern Ontario, Conservative Jay Aspin won his seat by 18 votes over former Liberal caucus chair Anthony Rota.

There's still one recount to go, which will be starting on the 18th of May in Etobicoke Centre.  Currently Conservative challenger Ted Opitz is leading by a small margin over sitting Liberal incumbent Borys Wrzesnewskyj.

It was all about the Sixties

The Roman Catholic Bishops of the United States commissioned a study to "analyze patterns of sex abuse".  It's conclusions?

WASHINGTON - Researchers commissioned by U.S. Roman Catholic bishops to analyze the pattern of clergy sex abuse over decades have concluded that homosexuality, celibacy and an all-male priesthood did not cause the scandal.

The report from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York said about 44 per cent of the known abuse cases involved priests who were ordained in the 1940s and 1950s, at a time when seminaries did not properly train them to live a celibate life. These men were not equipped to withstand the social upheaval of the 1960s, which was a time of an increase in sexual deviancy and a spike in crime in society at large, the authors said.

Apparently the reasons were primarily that they were not properly trained to live a celibate life and the 'increase in sexual deviancy' and crime during the 1960s.  Looks like they got it all figured out!  Also, this about sums up the whole debate between 'liberals' and 'conservatives' on the matter.

The debate over what caused the crisis has fallen along ideological lines, with liberals blaming mandatory celibacy or the lack of women in positions of authority. Conservatives pointed to gay priests, since the overwhelming majority of known victims were boys. 

Yep, it's a debate between whether there are administrative and doctrinal issues at play, or 'gay priests'.  Apparently the conservatives think that the Roman Catholic Church is full of 'em.

The Battle of Ideas

Monte Solberg does a pretty good job of beating the Liberals over the head on the issue of their current 'big idea' problems.  I don't see anything particularly wrong with anything he says in this article.  The Liberals aren't going to get anywhere through endlessly barking about how 'centrist' they are.

If anything is true, it is that the Tories are winning the 'battle of ideas'.  At first glance it seems ridiculous that Don Cherry is becoming a focal figure in a redefinition of Canadian nationalism, but conservatives have been working steadily to change Canadians' perceptions of themselves; in particular regarding the military and Canada's role in the world.  This new 'combative' form of Canadian nationalism doesn't bode well, especially given how prone it may turn out to be towards misogynous perceptions of women and 'nativistic' sensibilities regarding multi-ethnic immigration from abroad.

Also, remember those days when Canadians were willing to finance significant expansions of the Universities, to send our youth to far away lands on the public dime to learn about the world and spread Canadian values?  Trudeau certainly believed that these were worthy of the government's attention.  He also believed in reducing the economic influence of the United States in Canada.  Nowadays we see Liberals endlessly talking about how awesome they were at hacking apart services in order to solve our national calamity, the dreaded budget deficit.  And running on the continued generic expansion of free trade reinforces all of the Conservative narratives.  After all, it's so much easier as a conservative to tear apart the welfare state when you can get progressives to do it for you.

The Liberals increasingly no longer have the ability to agitate for progressive ideals, especially economic ones, with any kind of authority or credibility.  Their entire history since Chretien won a majority in 1993 has been to adhere to all of the long-term structural decisions made to the economy by the Conservatives.  All of the Liberal ideals of resisting free trade and American domination; Canadian nationalism based around the protection of social services.  Canadians are only willing to accept deficit spending grudgingly, a considerable achievement in working public opinion over the past decades on the part of the political right.  Now the Conservatives can use that advantage to advocate spending cuts over any form of upward flexibility in tax rates, putting progressives in a continual bind.

To respond to this long-term process I think the replacement of the Liberals with the NDP is a beneficial thing.  It's difficult to agitate for progressive social democratic ideals when the primary left-wing party at the federal level is full of people like John Manley, Paul Martin and other 'blue liberals' who have been at the forefront of bashing away at the institutions critical to the long-term well being of Canadians.  It'll be a difficult slog, but re-vitalization of the movement with the inclusion of organized labour from the ground up as well as the potential re-introduction of Quebec's significant progressive movement into the national sphere are promising signs.

One of these is not like the Other

The CBC reports on a press conference held by the NDP discussing its desire to raise funding for the arts in Canada.

The Globe and Mail trashes the same press conference.

Guess which one discusses substance at any length?

Is Anyone Surprised?

Donald Trump, potential candidate for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, has regretfully decided against running for the Presidency.  His candidacy would have done wonders for the potential of a massive Johnson-like landslide for the Democrats, yet his influence will continue to be felt into the future.

Is anyone actually surprised that this phony didn't seriously intend on running for the Presidency?  Regardless of how much 'the blacks' liked him or how hard he worked to appeal to the basest elements of the Republican Party, Trump never intended on doing anything past pushing himself into the media spotlight in the United States. There was no potential candidacy, just the desire of this pathetic man to flash a shiny light around that the press predictably followed.

Republicans Holding America Hostage with the Debt Ceiling

Today the United States expects to hit the debt ceiling currently set at $14.3 trillion as mandated by the US Congress.  While there have been a lot of attempts to fully explain what the debt ceiling actually is, the simplest answer is that the amount of debt that the US Treasury can legally accumulate through borrowing is fixed by Congress through legislation.  After hitting the ceiling the Treasury can get a hit of extra leeway through finessing a few hundred billion dollars extra, but Congress must pass a bill expanded upwards the debt limit for the American federal government.  If they fail to do so, the United States will default on its debt and all kinds of economic nastiness will occur.

With that in mind, the Obama Administration is now facing a game of Russian Roulette with the Republicans and some Democrats in Congress, who apparently are going to use the crisis-like urgency of the current situation as a  means of forcing through significant spending cuts in exchange for their votes.  The debt ceiling has been the subject of a lot of posturing in the past, but as Matthew Yglesias notes here, those episodes never involved the holding of the country's financial health hostage as a means to extract policy on the part of politicians in Congress.

What I'd add is that this constitutes a classic episode of Kleinian shock doctrine.  Use a crisis of some sort, in this case the reaching of the debt ceiling, as a means of passing radical market reforms to the economy over the heads of the mass of the American people.  After all, the urgency in which decisions have to be made naturally precludes much involvement from the citizenry, direct or indirect; hence this is the perfect moment to undertake a market fundamentalist's wildest dreams.

Conceding to the Republicans in this case could potentially create a precedent for the usage of the debt ceiling in the future as a political weapon.  President Obama and his Democratic allies on Capital Hill have to hold firm against the desires of the Republicans and the moral weakness of some Democrats to implement structural changes to the fiscal policy of the US Government.

How Not to Explain a Foreign Election - Time Magazine Edition

Erik Heinrich of Time decided to chime in on the Canadian federal election today with an utterly dreadful article that essentially argued that the flip of Quebec towards backing the NDP could be setting up the country for another referendum (surprise!).  Also, the oozing level of condensation aimed at the 'junior jacks' of the NDP's Quebec caucus is palpable:

Many voters in Quebec said they had voted NDP to give federalism a last fighting chance, after what they view as the failure of other national parties. But what chance does the new official opposition have of satisfying Quebec's traditional gripes — which include the call for autonomy over language and immigration policy — while relying on a large contingent of MPs with training wheels? 

It's fair to say that many NDP candidates did not expect to win seats, and they face a steep learning curve that will include language lessons for unilingual Anglophones representing French-only constituencies. 

"The NDP will need to turn its mind to how it can consolidate support in Quebec without alienating supporters in the rest of the country," says Robert Drummond, professor of political science and public policy at Toronto's York University. 

That balancing act could well prove to be the undoing of NDP's hold on the role of official opposition. Throw in inexperienced MPs more used to writing exams than they are to Question Period on the Hill, and it's easy to imagine Quebec voters again feeling shut out in Ottawa. That could lead to another independence referendum in Quebec in four years, in which separatists would argue that Ottawa has proven itself unable to deliver. But before such a rendez-vous with history, at least Canada's newest MPs will have a few years to work on their French.

Yes, what chance do they have when people like Erik Heinrich decide to take the quick route in gawking at the amount of young MPs in the caucus and pontificates upon his belief that they naturally cannot accomplish the tasks they've been thrown into?  "Has Canada lost its marbles?" he wonders.

I really hope that the reason why this article is so bad is because of the poor editing on the online edition.  Heinrich refers to 'Salty Jack Layton' as if that were either his real name or a moniker that readers are supposed to understand.  I imagine the intent is to remark upon the colour of his hair and mustache.  Similarly there's reference to the NDP's new MP from Pontiac, Mathieu Ravignat who apparently used to be a 'Community Party' candidate, when I know that he was in fact a Communist Party candidate back in the 1997 federal election.  The article concentrates on his executive status in the 'Ottawa Medieval Sword Guild' as if his Masters in Political Science and status as an organizer in the Canadian Union of Public Employees didn't matter.  It took me five minutes to dig up that information, but apparently it was too boring to make it into the article.

Americans apparently don't know a lot about Canada, but articles such as these are -definitely- not the way in which the readership of Time should be educated on Canadian politics.

The Separatist NDP Quebec Caucus

Jean-Louis Fortin of QMI concern trolls the NDP's Quebec caucus:

MONTREAL - Quebecers elected a good number of separatists when they voted en masse for NDP candidates in the May 2 federal election - perhaps without even knowing it. 

Alexandre Boulerice, the NDP's new MP for Montreal's Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie riding, proudly confessed to QMI Agency he continues to campaign for Quebec Solidaire, the provincial leftist party that promotes independence.

Apparently the running definition of a 'separatist' in Quebec is someone who has at any time in their lives supported the cause of or voted for a separatist party, regardless of current opinions:

Gilles Rheaume, Quebec independence activist and spokesman for a group that claims to fight "Canadian francophobia," said he isn't surprised by the number of Quebec NDP MPs who are separatists or who had professed support for sovereignty. 

"(The NDP) was infiltrated by sovereigntists since the beginning of the 1990s," Rheaume said.

Rheaume estimated at least a dozen new NDP MPs voted yes in the 1995 referendum, or had supported the sovereigntist movement in some way.

Rheaume believes that the NDP has been 'infiltrated' by separatists; maybe akin to how the party was 'infiltrated' by the democratic socialist wing of the party, "The Waffle", during the 1970s?  How well did that work out for that particular entryist group?

During the 1995 referendum on independence 49.4% of Quebeckers who voted did so in favour of independence.  I suppose that these individuals should be discounted then from federalist politics forever for the future?  Painted and smeared by the broad brush of supporting Quebec's national aspirations at a time when it seemed as if the bruised relations between Quebec and the rest of Canada could never be mended again.  Shouldn't it then be viewed as a significant good sign for Canadian national unity that Quebeckers who once voted to separate from the country are now embracing a federalist party over a sovereigntist one?

As pogge noted the other day, there will be a lot of journalists aiming to undermine the NDP by conjuring up all sorts of 'tid bits' on whatever these new NDP MPs from Quebec might have said or did say sixteen years ago.  However, there's also a tinge of elitist condensation from the two establishment parties (the Conservatives and the Liberals) that the NDP with all of its new 'brat pack' MPs cannot possibly expect to be capable and competent enough of 'managing Quebec' when they themselves failed with almost catastrophic consequences for the country.  They're the new players to Quebec federal politics who have had no electoral success in the past, let alone traction amongst the Quebec public.  Now after a single election the party now holds 59 of Quebec's 75 seats in the House of Commons.

Many have and will say that the inclusion of former separatists into the NDP's Quebec big tent is going to cause chaos within the party.  I believe though that it's possible that the Quebec caucus as well as the grassroots that the NDP is going to be working hard to development, could become a source of policy development in the future on the political left in this country; in addition to acting as a sort of forge for the construction of a consensus for the task of bringing Quebec into the Constitution.

Fiscal Conservatism

Via the Toronto Star:

OTTAWA—As Conservatives prepare to recall Parliament, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is setting the stage for a clampdown on federal government spending under the newly elected government, that would include cutting the public service by 80,000 — or one-third.

The Conservatives now have the power to cut spending to bring down the deficit, says Flaherty, a message that could foreshadow a round of deep cuts to services and programs in coming years.

I've made my own opinions clear on the causes of Canada's current fiscal deficit; a combination of tax cuts and the recession has pushed Canada into a sea of red ink.  Not surprising the Tories' solution to fixing this rather fixable problem is to choose austerity by axing a third of the entire civil service.  The Tories are arguing that they want to concentrate on the economy by focusing specifically on the deficit; yet spending reductions, especially the kind of hardcore austerity that results from hacking apart a third of the civil service, are only going to add further downward pressure on the Canadian economy.  Precisely as the British Conservatives have done and experienced across the pond.  This increases the likelihood of a double dip recession and will only serve to depress revenues and increase outlays through social spending programs such as EI, widening the deficit in the process.

The Conservatives aren't stupid, they know that this is the case.  Which leads us to another matter, which is the intentional underfunding of the public sector with the purpose of undermining the welfare state.  If you can't simply destroy the Canadian Pension Plan, Medicare or Employment Insurance through direct legislation (this would be political suicide), then why not underfund and under-staff them so they are indirectly denied the ability to preform the services to which they are intended?

Quoting Mrs. Ducharme, national executive vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada:

“If we went back to the 1990s, the federal government cut around 45,000 jobs, and they realized pretty quickly that they didn’t have the people to actually do the work that Canadians expect.”

She said the people who suffer in this scenario are those most dependent on government services such as immigrants, the unemployed, pensioners and military veterans.

“I think this government really needs to stop and think through some of their ideas before they, quite honestly, destroy the public service and services that are expected, needed and delivered as part of everyone’s day-to-day lives,” Ducharme said.

 They did think it through, which is why they're doing what they're doing.

Could American-Style Supreme Court Struggles Come to Canada?

Kirk Makin says that with now two vacant positions on the Supreme Court, that Harper has the opportunity to entrench a conservative majority:

In an opinion piece he wrote for The Globe and Mail in 2000, in which Mr. Harper explained why he was trying to have a federal election law overturned by the courts, he offhandedly endorsed criticisms of so-called activist judges: “Yes, I share many of the concerns of my colleagues and allies about biased ‘judicial activism’ and its extremes. I agree that serious flaws exist in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that there is no meaningful review or accountability mechanisms for Supreme Court justices.”

While Judge Charron was conservative when it came to criminal justice issues and the Charter, Judge Binnie, a skilled jurist in every area of the law, was one of the few liberal voices on the court.

The notion of a liberal bloc forming is quickly moving out of reach. Legal experts believe that Madam Justice Rosalie Abella, the only left-leaning judge on the court, is now doomed to perpetually find herself on the wrong end of 8-1 court decisions.

If there's anything to be learned from the efforts of conservatives in the United States, it is that they are more than willing to play the long game of using judicial bodies such as the Supreme Court and lower courts as a means of entrenching and institutionalizing conservatism into the very fabric of the state.  Harper's previous complaints about 'judicial activism' is classic rhetoric pulled directly from the play book of conservatives in the States.  Conservatives attack the courts as 'activist' in the sense that they use constitutional documents as precedents to expand civil rights to individuals or groups; this was the case in regards to same-sex marriage where they were expanded exclusively by judicial rulings across the country.  Yet conservatives find little wrong with judicial decisions favorable to their interpretations which have absolutely no precedent in tradition or legal statute.  In the United States this happened with Citizens United v Federal Election Commission which overturned the McCain-Feingold Act and paved the way to a massive influx of corporate money into American politics; in particular the campaigns of conservative Republicans.

If anything can be gleamed from progressives' stances on the court in the United States, it is that inaction or ignorance to the intent and actions of conservatives regarding judicial appointments is a colossal mistake that can lead to enormous political defeats.  Progressives in Canada can not allow themselves to merely think that prior traditions regarding the Supreme Court are going to hold firm in this country, especially with a modern conservative movement intent on denying the left the capability to enact any significant social change in the future.

In a significant way the strategy of using institutions such as the judicial courts as mechanisms of institutionalizing conservatism is similar to conservatives' position on the Canadian Senate.  The intent isn't to 'bring democracy' to the 'Other Place'.  It is designed to strengthen a veto point on future legislation drafted by a theoretical left-wing House of Commons, through entrenching conservative Senators into a position where they can block or diminish the strength and relevance of progressive legislation permanently.  It is a long game that progressives must be aware of, lest they end up forced to fight from behind.

Your New Right-Wing Media

Pogge ruminated today on the subject of how he believes political pundits are likely to treat the NDP moving into the future:

I would expect that more articles like the column by Jeffrey Simpson in today's Globe and Mail are in our future. I'm sure that speculating about the possibility of internal dissent in the NDP will be a new national pastime for political pundits. At least, for that portion of the nation's pundits who want to undermine the NDP.

The Canadian media almost exclusively is a business elite media.  I can't think of any significant and influential working class papers other then the Sun franchise, which itself is just a mouthpiece of capital.  Canada doesn't have any papers that have acted as organs for socialist thought on a wider scale such as The Guardian has done for the United Kingdom.  This puts the New Democrats at a disadvantage as they're going to be confronting an almost united hostile editorial stance to its ideological disposition.  It's true that the Toronto Star endorsed the NDP this election around, but they were one paper amongst many and a Toronto-based news print can't be expected to move minds that far outside of Ontario.

Papers such as The Globe and Mail and the Winnipeg Free Press generally take liberal positions on civil rights and social issues such as same-sex marriage, multiculturalism, etc. but they also rigidly support capital on issues such as free trade and corporation taxation.  While the Liberal Party fit this liberal-conservative position most of the time and some of these papers were in fact founded as Liberal Party organs many decades ago, the NDP's social democratic positions on the economy are viewed as a potential assault on the integrity of the market as far as they're concerned.

Deficit Woes

Apparently hoping the media wasn't noticing, current Finance Minister Jim Flaherty waded into the American political scene by warning the Americans that they must rectify their deficit issues pronto; then the Government indicated on the same day that they were likely to break a campaign promise by failing to balance the Canadian federal budget by 2014-2015.  Firstly, why is Flaherty even bothering to lecture the Americans on this issue?  His management of the deficit while Finance Minister in Ontario under Harris was horrendous.  And how good does he think the optics are of meeting with Rep. Paul Ryan, the architect of the infamous budget that would have privatized Medicare in the United States.

Secondly, the Tories have pressed hard that the deficit is a major issue in the country.  For the most part the deficit I figure is cycle-related.  Even back in 2009 when the deficit reached its high, most of the extra spending was related to the auto industry rescue, which turned out to be a massive success, along with increased EI pay outs and decreased revenues from the recession.  The cyclical nature of the problem thus makes cutting stimulus spending absolutely absurd, since it along with cuts to government spending through a sort of United Kingdom-like austerity program will merely act to suck away aggregate demand from the economy; diminishing a recovery and increasing unemployment in the process.

For me though this is the kicker,

Mr. Flaherty said he often gets questions from his American counterparts on Canada’s experience dealing with a fiscal crunch. “It’s an opportunity for me to talk about our view that we are on the right track, that this is doable” Mr. Flaherty said.

He said he thinks there are lessons for U.S. politicians in the way Canada ended a generation of budget shortfalls in the 1990s.

“I think the recent history of Canada shows we can move from a time of dramatic deficits where the (International Monetary Fund) was eyeing our country and our currency was weak to a time of stability and solidity with a good plan going forward,” Mr. Flaherty said. “That’s useful generally because we have been through difficult times.”

In the early 1990s Canada was facing a significant debt problem which threatened to cut off international financing, potentially forcing the country to take a loan from the IMF; presumably with all of the baggage of a restructuring program aimed at dismantling all sorts of public assets and elements of the welfare state.  What is missing from this discussion is the part where the Liberals are the ones responsible for balancing the federal budget during the 90s, partially by raiding education, military and provincial transfer expenditures.

Also missing is the part where the Conservative Party's remarkably weak record on deficit management is discussed, specifically the colossal amounts of debt collected by the Mulroney government during the 1980s and then the move from surplus into structural deficit through GST and corporate tax cuts during the first Minority under Stephen Harper.  Overall, Tory governments at the federal level have tended towards the creation of massive amounts of debt for the country.  Presumably this is why Flaherty's trying to carpet it over by attempting to speak with some authority on the subject of how the deficit was eliminated in the first place during the 90s, even if the Tories were out of power and the Liberals were the ones actually responsible.

In a way this is comparable to if a foreigner asked a Republican for help in attempting to implementing expansions to health care access; there's a clear credibility issue at play.

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.