Click here to access article by Dean Baker from Real-World Economics Review Blog.
Let me be clear--I am only posting this to illustrate how limited and superficial a liberal critique of current government policies are. This sort of attack on current and recent policies are what passes for "left" criticism in the US political spectrum which has steadily drifted to the right over the past 40 years. As such, it serves several purposes in keeping the system as it is.
First, although it does attack the real problems of injustice in the US, the author explains its failings as incompetence by the managers of the economic system, and suggests only some reforms to solve the problems. Second, it carefully avoids any mention of the underlying system of capitalism which shapes the unjust policies mentioned by the author. Third, attacks like this serve the system by posing as critical views and thereby serve to demonstrate that there is diversity of political opinions, and that this is an indication of real democracy. In other words, the ruling class requires critical pieces like this to sustain its fake version of democracy. However, to the author's credit in contrast to most liberal critics, he does argue that there is little difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on these issues.
To me, it is so obviously wrong to argue that the current economic collapse was brought about because of incompetence. ("These people’s lives are being ruined due to the mismanagement of the economy.") So many people were in on the mortgage scam and profited hugely by it: from real estate sales people, to financial institutions that packaged and peddled the mortgage snake oil all over the world, to rating agencies that gave their stamps of approval on the packages, and to hedge funds who gambled on them. There was widespread knowledge of the scam and yet it continued simply because it was so lucrative for all the players involved. I think it likely that a lot of this financial trash was sold via Goldman Sachs to compliant European government officials, who likely also benefited from scam, in order to undermine the Euro which had been competing very well against the US dollar.
His comments about the attacks on Social Security are superficial. The fact is that the political operatives of the ruling class have been using the huge Social Security pot of money to fund their many wars without raising taxes. Instead of this money being kept in a separate trust fund and invested, it was made available to the Empire's war criminals. They blew it and now they don't want to raise taxes to pay it back to the current baby-boom retirees. See this, this, this, and this.
But, it is the system itself whose dynamic of private ownership of socially produced wealth that makes this sort of corruption inevitable, and it is not surprising that the self-serving class of private owners insist that working people pay for their criminal practices.
