Perfect timing for this post. A Wisconsin University system English professor Bradley Butterfield just wrote an opinion piece regarding this topic in our local liberal paper.
Here is Bradley Butterfield’s opinion (mega barf alert):
Today’s conservatives have succeeded in turning a myth invented by The Heritage Foundation and President George W. Bush’s budget director, Joshua Bolten, into a commonly accepted “reality,” namely: that entitlements are the principle cause of our nation’s financial problems, and that raising taxes on the rich and cutting military spending wouldn’t even come close to solving these problems.
As Bruce Bartlett, adviser to president Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush has pointed out, this supposed reality is “factually wrong.”
In the words of economist Jeff Madrick, “America’s biggest fiscal problem is not spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; it is our almost complete unwillingness to tax ourselves sufficiently to maintain a modern state.”
Meanwhile, as Joel Slemrod and Jon Bakija write in “Taxing Ourselves,” there is no relationship between high taxes and reduced rates of economic growth. U.S. citizens are taxed at an average of 26 percent of their income, while prosperous Sweden, Norway and Denmark have tax rates of 49 percent and higher.
Given their anti-government ideology, conservatives have long had it in for entitlement programs, hence the myth of Social Security’s insolvency. But Social Security could be made solvent either by raising the payroll-tax cap, which limits withholding to incomes below $110,000, or by eliminating the cap altogether.
The same holds for our other entitlement programs, including “Obamacare.” America’s budget shortfalls are due to the Bush tax cuts and unfunded wars, not our entitlement programs. We have a revenue problem, not a spending problem.
Link:
The fellow certainly likes to name-drop, so it's no surprise that he drops the names of Sweden, Norway and Denmark (all of them constitutional monarchies, by the way.)
Note that we're not invited to look under the hood, for:
That’s just what I want. To be like Sweden, Norway, or Denmark.
FOAD Mr. Butterfield.