In defense of Alan Simpson – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
Glenn posits that Chairman Simpson’s belligerence helps pull down a veil of secrecy around the deficit reduction commission :
That’s why Commission co-chair Alan Simpson — with his blunt contempt for Social Security and and other benefit programs (such as aid to disabled veterans) and his acknowledged eagerness to slash them — has done the country a serious favor. His recent outbursts have unmasked this Commission and shed light on its true character. Unlike his fellow Commission members, who imperiously dismiss public inquiries into what they’re doing as though they’re annoying and inappropriate, Simpson — to his genuine credit — has been aggressively engaging critics, making it impossible to ignore what the Commission is really up to.
And he notes that the sources of the deficit were the twin policies of endless war and tax cuts for the wealthy that accelerate widening income inequality in America. Should those who most need Social Security sacrifice to pay for wars and tax cuts?
One of the most significant developments in the U.S. is the rapidly and severely increasing rich-poor gap. A middle class standard of living is being suffocated and even slowly eliminated, as budget cuts cause an elimination of services that are hallmarks of first-world living. Because the wealthiest Americans continue to consolidate both their monopoly on wealth and, more important, their control of Congress and the government generally, we respond to all of this by enacting even more policies which exacerbate that gap and favor even more the wealthiest factions while taking more from the poorest and most powerless. And now, the very people responsible for the vulernable financial state of the U.S. want to address that problem by targeting one of the very few guarantors in American life of a humane standard of living: Social Security.
I think Greenwald often goes a bit too far, but in this case I agree with him. Social Security has nothing to do with current deficits in the first place and expecting the poor to pay for destructive policy choices of the past is just plain wrong. Another aspect of this if that defenders of Obama seem to find it necessary to support the goals of the Deficit Commission has a necessary hallmark of “seriousness”.
