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The U.S. welfare state has "run up against a brick wall" of economic reality and fiscal book-keeping and only a "true revolution" involving major entitlement overhaul will improve the economy, says former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.
In the United States, the rise of the tea party among Republicans coupled with the shift to the left of many Democrats have made it very difficult for the country's leaders to agree on policy.
Look at last year's debt-ceiling fiasco as an example.
"A political tsunami has emerged out of our past in the form of the Tea Party, with its ethos reminiscent of rugged individualism and self-reliance," Greenspan writes in a Financial Times op-ed piece.
The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.
In my opinion, Greenspan is exactly right! We are so far down the black hole, that we have to just embrace it and come out the other side. No turning back now.
The fall will be unprecedently difficult! It might be on par with the ends of other civilizations. I'm by no means looking forward to it, but I'm afraid day by day it becomes more inevitable.
anyone care to explain to me just how the "entitlements" had anything whatsoever to do with it??