During the debt ceiling debate, leftist websites were filled with outrage that entitlements had become an object of debate at all, rather than the supposed need for another stimulus. Now, the combination of the S&P downgrade and the super-committee solution means that the debt crisis will remain the central political issue in the country for months. Supposedly, Obama’s major victory in the debt ceiling negotiations was to put the issue off until after the 2012 election. Thanks to S&P, that achievement is now in ruins.
This is why the left has turned more wrath on S&P than on the Tea Party itself. The extent to which the left does not even want to recognize the entitlement crisis as a danger can scarcely be exaggerated. Yet, with the parallel and interlocking European and American debt crises now guaranteed to be on the front pages for months, it will be impossible to pretend that America’s out-of-control entitlements are not a problem. The left has been saddled with a losing issue at the worst possible time.
No wonder the administration is working so hard to discredit the S&P downgrade. For it is a unbiased accounting that states the welfare state cannot be sustained by the capitalist system, and that a choice must be made: To accept perpetual 10% unemployment, 50% tax rates, and choking government regulation in order to provide a generous social safety net (including socialized medicine), or to break away from this societal poison and return to our roots as an entrepreneurial society with limited government and limited social programming.
Wow. 2012 is going to be a monster...