Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,693]

Arizona Official Releases Voter List Sought by Activists After Court Order

The secretary of state had objected to turning over names of people without a record of proof of citizenship to lawyers for a right-wing group, fearing the potential consequences.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/us/politics/arizona-voting-citizenship-voter-rolls.html

 

“I don’t want blood on my hands,” Adrian Fontes, the Arizona secretary of state, had said in a court hearing last month.Credit...Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, said Monday that his office had handed over the names of hundreds of thousands of voters to lawyers for a right-wing activist group as ordered by a court, adding that he regretted having to do so and worried about the potential consequences.

“I tried to stop this,” he told reporters in a news conference in Phoenix. “I have fought as hard as I could to keep your names and your personal identifying information away from the folks who I don’t trust — and I have good reason not to trust them with that specific information.”

The legal fight originated with an obscure technical issue in a state database that left Arizona without a record of proof of citizenship for 218,000 voters. Arizona requires such proof to vote in state elections.

A judge had ruled that the voters on the list would be allowed to vote the full ballot in Tuesday’s election despite the error. But last month lawyers for America First Legal, an organization founded by the former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, sued for the release of the names of the affected voters on behalf of a right-wing group in Phoenix, the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona.

Mr. Fontes, a Democrat, argued that doing so would expose the people on the list to harassment and potentially violence at a time when former President Donald J. Trump and others are stoking fears of noncitizen voting in Tuesday’s elections. During the 2022 midterms in Arizona, armed right-wing activists, inspired by conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, took it upon themselves to monitor voting.

“I don’t want blood on my hands,” Mr. Fontes said in a court hearing last month.

The court order imposes strict conditions on the release of the voter list, which will be made available only to certain county election officials and a handful of state legislators, who are prohibited from distributing it further. Opponents of the release noted that those groups include several figures who have been prominent voices in the state’s election-denial movement since the 2020 election.

In Thursday’s ruling, a Superior Court judge found that Mr. Fontes had not demonstrated that the Strong Communities Foundation, which is led by Merissa Hamilton, a local activist who is also a former Republican mayoral candidate, specifically posed a threat to the people on the list.

In an email, Ms. Hamilton confirmed that Mr. Fontes’s office had given the data to her lawyers, who “have provided it to the election officials who agreed to the court’s stipulations so they can do their jobs and ensure the voters that their vote matters and will count.”

[cosmicway 1,313]

What are Hamash-Hezbollah expecting from Trump ?
Lenience ?
Not likely but what can he do more ?
Bomb them twice ?
What they are expecting from him is to create a more tense environment so as to enable them to spread their brand of terrorism further.
They made their calculations before the 7/10 last year.
Tomorrow they will say "we won".

Edited Tuesday at 08:42 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,693]

Elon Musk liked this enough to repost it

🤮

[Fulham Broadway 16,797]

15 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Elon Musk liked this enough to repost it

🤮

His daughter was more to the point...

calling the illegal South African migrant ''a racist bigoted motherfucker and a treasonous Nazi'' 

[IMissEden 18]

Personally I think taking a hard-line against abortion, is Neolithic, and from a policy perspective more ignorant than anything. 
 

Look to Nature, not Theory. Look to Facts, not Theory. Look at the animal kingdom. It’s obviously normal to prioritise the wellbeing of the parent. Many animals kill their fully birthed babies, as they know they won’t be able to feed them. Or that if they did, they’d suddenly be jeopardised themselves. 
 

Autonomy over one’s body is really beyond important, that it is awkward to even acknowledge that there exists opposition to the clear truth that nobody makes decisions over others bodies. We did not either as monkeys or cave dwellers do that. Lead, yes. Control, no. 
 

It being baked in so core to the red side is surely no question one way or another The cornerstone of undoing. You can’t so deeply violate and disturb, scare and upset, burden so many people. Equally this does not mean let’s all be whores. Balance. Of course in politics, you lead with loud bold intentions, to win votes, then follow-up far more reserved. I wonder what the case would be with a Trump win there. 
 

I imagine we all suffer from echo chambers, to bias news. I think if we online had our common sense as intact as we had say 10 years ago, we’d know no question that this sole policy = Blue will win. Too many women, mothers, dads, sisters, exist - and just guys with empathy. It’s easy to thought-experiment scenarios wherein true intentions between a guy and girl result in say a pregnant 17 18 year old who doesn’t want a baby, and no baby really will want the mother who didn’t want them vs one who does. 
 

So, literally now, and as Red tone as it is, Blue should slogan this - What’s The Harm? - literally - question - in stopping the growth not life of a bundle of cells and blobs. Obviously there should be pressure or education to abort early and not late — strong parents needed in times of high emotions in developing minds.
 

All said it’s still not Trump vs Harris or simply these vs those policies. There remains all that in the balance, but the real What You’re Voting For politically, is accepting the shadow state - and turning a blind eye to their parties policies toward comforting idealistic fallacies —- which feel so good that they remain in fashion despite chaos caused. Or voting for reversion essentially to simpler and more transparent politics - no shadow state. That’s what compelled Musk, someone who seeks as much info as possible, to want involvement —- definitely without question believing Blue for now to be a masterfully designed deception of shepherds leading lambs to slaughter. I wonder how many Migrant Doctors have set off bombs in Stockholm this year. 
 

Scandinavia, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Austria, France, UK, USA, all shifting more conservative due to migrant issues. I struggle to reconcile that hardline in USA, Brazil however given the disregard for environment coming from those guys. 
 

All in all, people are sacrificing themselves to try put the breaks on an ever faster arrival of dissolution of most we’ve known in our time. 

[Vesper 28,693]

Poll closing times

All times are US Eastern Standard Time (5 hours behind London, 6 hours behind Stockholm and the rest of CET)

7 p.m. ET — 60 electoral votes at stake

Georgia
Indiana*
Kentucky*
South Carolina
Vermont
Virginia

*Indiana and Kentucky are in split time zones

7:30 p.m. ET — 37 electoral votes

North Carolina
Ohio
West Virginia

8 p.m. ET — 171 electoral votes

Alabama
Connecticut
D.C.
Delaware
Florida*
Illinois
Maine (ME-2)
Maryland
Massachusetts
Mississippi
Missouri
New Hampshire
New Jersey
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Tennessee

*Florida has split time zones

8:30 p.m. ET — 6 electoral votes

Arkansas

9 p.m. ET — 163 electoral votes

Arizona
Wisconsin
Michigan*
Colorado
Iowa
Kansas*
Louisiana
Minnesota
Nebraska (NE-2)
New Mexico
New York
North Dakota*
South Dakota*
Texas*
Wyoming

*Michigan, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota and Texas are in split time zones

10 p.m. ET — 16 electoral votes

Nevada
Montana
Utah

11 p.m. ET — 78 electoral votes

California
Idaho*
Oregon*
Washington

*Idaho and Oregon are in split time zones

12 a.m. ET — 4 electoral votes

Hawaii

1 a.m. ET — 3 electoral votes

Alaska*

*Alaska has split time zones

[Vesper 28,693]

17 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

His daughter was more to the point...

calling the illegal South African migrant ''a racist bigoted motherfucker and a treasonous Nazi'' 

Musk is a HUGE national security threat (and a global threat, both go far beyond just X)

He has open backdoor channels to fucking Putin (and dog knows who else), whilst having billions of dollars of US government contracts and also his controlling huge swathes of the US space, security, and military programmes.

insanity he is not under multiple investigations (that we know of)

my risk analysis team at my job is just gobsmacked

Edited Tuesday at 14:35 by Vesper

[KEVINAA 89]

KMLA HRS is supposed to and going to win and then they will take forever to announce the winner to build up tension and chaos so the public start a civil war in America. So the government can bring in curfews and martial law and lockdowns to bring in the new 2025 global Blockchain currency to replace the US DOLLAR.

 

I do not support any form of governance. I believe in people working together without government involvement in our lives.

 

Govern-Ment in Latin means to govern is to control the mind [Control Mind = Mind Control]

Edited Tuesday at 16:07 by KEVINAA

[robsblubot 3,496]

Nah the process is that slow. It's independently run by each state (some states employ manual counting too), which makes the claims of mass fraud even more laughable -- it's a decentralized system!

The problem with overturning the results this time is that, despite what some of his supporters think, Trump ain't the president.

Results will start to come in tonight, so we may have an idea about the outcome by then, but not much else. Tomorrow will likely provide a clearer picture.

Edited Tuesday at 17:24 by robsblubot

[cosmicway 1,313]

There are many component situations working in favour of Trump.
Biggest crap of them all is in my opinion Biden's failure to nip in the bud the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The rivers of dollars needed now for weapons to Ukraine would n't be needed. All he had to do was send some NATO forces to Ukraine before the invasion of February 2022 started. There is n't a chance in a billion trillion of Putin invading Ukraine if NATO was there.
Trump did n't even deserve to be a serious contender after the J6 events he caused back in 2020.
Dems however made the unjustified decision to support wokism instead of embracing Christianity. Because everything Trump does and says is anti-christian, including his disrespect for human rights of course, the guns, the opposition to a universal health care system. Roman emperor Diocletian the persecutor might have been a little less antichristian than that.

[robsblubot 3,496]

7 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

There are many component situations working in favour of Trump.
Biggest crap of them all is in my opinion Biden's failure to nip in the bud the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The rivers of dollars needed now for weapons to Ukraine would n't be needed. All he had to do was send some NATO forces to Ukraine before the invasion of February 2022 started. There is n't a chance in a billion trillion of Putin invading Ukraine if NATO was there.
Trump did n't even deserve to be a serious contender after the J6 events he caused back in 2020.
Dems however made the unjustified decision to support wokism instead of embracing Christianity. Because everything Trump does and says is anti-christian, including his disrespect for human rights of course, the guns, the opposition to a universal health care system. Roman emperor Diocletian the persecutor might have been a little less antichristian than that.

I strongly disagree. Americans in general care little about the rest of the world. That's the least important aspect IMO.

"Wokism" however you may define it, along with white man victimhood are the main Trump cards. This is very ironic of course, given that much of it is fabricated -- the per-capita GDP is pretty impressive even in "poor" states (where billionaires don't live).

bear in mind we are talking about small percentages here; US elections are always close because of the party divide.

Edited Tuesday at 17:25 by robsblubot

[cosmicway 1,313]

8 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

I strongly disagree. Americans in general care little about the rest of the world. That's the least important aspect IMO.

"Wokism" however you may define it, along with white man victimhood are the main Trump cards. This is very ironic of course, given that much of it is fabricated -- the per-capita GDP is pretty impressive even in "poor" states (where billionaires don't live).

bear in mind we are talking about small percentages here; US elections are always close because of the party divide.

I don't know how much they care about world events.
They cared about the spread of communism, only that was perceived as a political threat as well as a military threat.
But re. Ukraine they do care about the money spent and it is real money.
The differences are usually small but Trump is a fun figure like Barry Goldwater.

[robsblubot 3,496]

Just now, cosmicway said:

I don't know how much they care about world events.
They cared about the spread of communism, only that was perceived as a political threat as well as a military threat.
But re. Ukraine they do care about the money spent and it is real money.
The differences are usually small but Trump is a fun figure like Barry Goldwater.

Yeah maybe, but then again they care about the money spent there because Trump tells them they should.

[cosmicway 1,313]

Just now, robsblubot said:

Yeah maybe, but then again they care about the money spent there because Trump tells them they should.

Factored, but it is real money and prices have gone up because of it.

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,917]

3 hours ago, Vesper said:

Musk is a HUGE national security threat (and a global threat, both go far beyond just X)

He has open backdoor channels to fucking Putin (and dog knows who else), whilst having billions of dollars of US government contracts and also his controlling huge swathes of the US space, security, and military programmes.

insanity he is not under multiple investigations (that we know of)

my risk analysis team at my job is just gobsmacked

Are they really shocked a rich white guy isnt facing any consequences in America?😂

[robsblubot 3,496]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

Factored, but it is real money and prices have gone up because of it.

Nope... COVID.

Quote

The estimated cumulative financial costs of the COVID-19 pandemic related to the lost output and health reduction is shown in Table 1. The total cost is estimated at more than $16 trillion, or roughly 90% of annual GDP of the United States.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7604733/#:~:text=The estimated cumulative financial costs,GDP of the United States.

[Vesper 28,693]

From Left to Right and Beyond: The Strange Migration of Political Mavericks

Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., and Sahra Wagenknecht are crossing political lines—are they chasing headlines or revealing deeper political divides?

https://www.socialeurope.eu/from-left-to-right-and-beyond-the-strange-migration-of-political-mavericks

Sahra Wagenknecht at a BSW election event for the European elections in Kiel (photo: penofoto/shutterstock.com)

 

What do Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the German politician Sahra Wagenknecht have in common? They all appear to have migrated across the political spectrum. Gabbard and Kennedy are both former Democrats who now vocally support Donald Trump, and Wagenknecht has gone from the far left of Germany’s Left Party to strident nationalism. Earlier this year, she founded a new party modestly named after herself. After faring well in elections in three East German states this fall, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance seems likely to enter the Bundestag in the 2025 federal election. 

Do these political migrations reflect a mere opportunistic betrayal of principles, or is something more complicated going on? An obvious explanation is psychological: moves across the political spectrum earn the precious currency of attention. People accustomed to a high profile in the media sometimes need a dramatic gesture to get themselves back in the news. But the limits of such a reductionist explanation are obvious: most – if not all – politicians are after the limelight, but very few switch parties and positions. 

A more interesting explanation draws on twentieth-century history. When communists and fascists seemed to join forces in opposing liberalism, the world was introduced to “les extrêmes se touchent” (the extremes meet), or what has come to be known as the horseshoe theory of political extremism. Peculiar red-brown mixtures were prominent during the Weimar Republic, when political entrepreneurs combined pro-worker positions and radical nationalism to advocate a Querfront – an alliance cutting across the political spectrum. That said, proponents of “Prussian socialism” or Gregor Strasser’s leftist version of Nazism always remained in the minority (Strasser himself was murdered by Hitler’s henchmen in 1934). 

The horseshoe theory relies on the assumption that anti-liberalism must lead, sooner or later, to adopting positions shared by one’s official political adversaries. But this might be true only at a very abstract level. Socialists and a certain type of conservative can both find fault with capitalism, but the nature of their critiques will differ. The conservative might lament the destruction of traditional ways of life, whereas the socialist will complain about workers’ lack of freedom. Likewise, policy prescriptions can look similar at an abstract level – both conservatives and socialists might advocate smaller cooperative communities – but their details will differ dramatically. 

The horseshoe theory also is easily abused by liberals, because it allows for a double punch against criticisms from the left. These can be labelled as not only extremist, but even the stuff of Nazism. Few polemical moves are more effective. 

In any case, Wagenknecht’s political journey is the only one that seems to be based on a comprehensive anti-liberalism. Kennedy and Gabbard’s moves, by contrast, appear to be animated by the idea that one issue is of such overriding importance that it justifies switching camps. 

For his part, Kennedy is obsessed with vaccines, which he insists are unsafe, even though all such claims have been comprehensively debunked. For Gabbard, the issue is America’s “forever wars.” She apparently has concluded that Trump would be a peacemaker-in-chief; and Kennedy embraced Trump as a potential healer-in-chief, because he supposedly wants more policies addressing “chronic disease” (he also reportedly sought a meeting with Kamala Harris’s campaign, which showed no interest in his overture). 

Coat-switching politicians face an obvious question: Why did you ever ally with people who fail to see the overriding importance of your pet issue, or who drew fundamentally different conclusions about it? Not everyone will respond with a conspiracy theory, but claiming that your former political allies have all been corrupted certainly is the easiest answer. Not surprisingly, Kennedy is notorious for spewing dangerous conspiracy theories, and Gabbard has spent years concocting stories about Hillary Clinton, whom she portrays as an evil warmonger. 

So, this is how the shift from the “far out” to the far right can happen. It starts with an issue that is much more important than all others, but which your allies do not regard with the same urgency. When you no longer have their ear, you turn to whomever will have you. But the only party that will have you is the one that has its own reasons for wanting to make your former team look corrupt. 

Wagenknecht’s story is more complicated. A talented rhetorician and regular guest on TV programs, she is effective in repeating dubious claims about Russia’s war against Ukraine. But, unlike Kennedy and Gabbard, she is a real political strategist. Her party is designed to fill what she sees as an unoccupied political space – nationalism combined with socialism – in Germany’s multiparty landscape, and she has seized on wedge issues to split other parties apart. 

For example, Wagenknecht sees the war in Ukraine as a way to divide both Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. After this year’s elections in eastern Germany, Christian Democrats agreed to coalition talks with her alliance, in order to keep the far-right Alternative für Deutschland out of power in those states. But now, Wagenknecht insists that any coalition agreement contain language about the war that she knows CDU leaders cannot support (never mind that state governments do not conduct foreign policy). 

Prominent figures in her own party are willing to compromise, but Wagenknecht, who seems to want an iron grip on her “Alliance,” seeks to discredit any such position. Like Lenin, she appears willing to split her own party rather than lose control and tolerate deviations from ideological purity. 

Of course, the political system in a democracy should be open. There is nothing wrong with political innovators drawing new lines of conflict; that is what enables political realignments. But there is a problem when such innovators rely on conspiracy theories and seek to delegitimise their adversaries and the political system in general. 

Quinn Slobodian and Will Callison refer to the latter phenomenon as “diagonalism,” writing: “At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.” Slobodian and Callison first identified “thinking diagonally” – a translation of the German concept of Querdenken – during the pandemic, when prominent anti-vaxxers fomented protests against public health policies that often united far-left New Age types and hard-right agitators. 

Now, diagonalism appears to be spreading in a world of parallel media universes. There, one finds plenty of pent-up political discontent about singular, overriding issues – whatever they may be.

Edited Tuesday at 20:05 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,693]

Why social investment holds the key to delivering on the Draghi report

A vast untapped potential for improving economic progress and social well-being across the EU needs to be unlocked through social investment.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/why-social-investment-holds-the-key-to-delivering-on-the-draghi-report

Press Conference on the Report on the Future of EU Competitiveness in Brussels (photo: Alexandros Michailidis/shutterstock.com)

 

The report by Mario Draghi on the future of competitiveness (together with Enrico Letta’s report on the Single Market) is a landmark publication poised to shape the agenda of the incoming European Commission. According to Draghi, the foundations of the European economic growth model are under strain. World trade expansion is in decline, the era of cheap Russian gas has ended, and new security concerns call for a fundamental policy overhaul. To meet the challenge, 800 billion in public and private investment must be mobilised. Simply put, European policymakers must shift paradigmatic gears in governing the economy if the EU wants to remain relevant amidst intensified economic and political competition between China and the USA. 

From a welfare state perspective, the report represents a significant step forward in considering the relationship between economic growth and social policy in positive terms. The strong emphasis on productivity through knowledge and skills, moving away from the narrow focus on (gross unit labour) cost-competitiveness that dominated the early years of the Great Recession, brings back into view the notion of social policy as a productive factor. However, we believe that Draghi’s plea to ‘preserve’ the European Social Model is unnecessarily defensive, as if competitiveness and productivity fall outside the purview of European welfare states in times of accelerating ageing and increased geopolitical competition. They do not: economic prosperity is a function of productivity and employment, which is precisely what a robust welfare state supports.

The Draghi report would have benefited from a more engaged reading of the 2023 high-level group report The Future of Social Protection and the Welfare State, commissioned by the European Commission (hereafter HLG-Report). Draghi may be concrete on the ‘money question’ of billions of private and public investments, but the report is somewhat imprecise on the ‘people question’ of those who need to be mobilised and how. In addition, the report is relatively narrow regarding questions of governance. Draghi recognises that Europe’s working-age population is set to decline by 25 – 30 million workers in the coming years but falls short of offering a comprehensive solution. Demography is not destiny. In this contribution, we argue that an effective welfare state to support Europe’s untapped labour potential through inclusive employment with greater autonomy for dual-earner households and better work-life balance is critical to delivering a more competitive and prosperous European Union. We also question Draghi’s proposal to trim down EU economic governance.

Recasting the narrative on welfare spending and economic growth 

To demonstrate what kind of welfare state is needed to support a more competitive economy, it is first essential to counter popular misconceptions about the relationship between welfare spending and economic growth. Population ageing – rising life expectancy and falling fertility – indeed puts additional fiscal pressures on public expenditure. For far too long, the debate on ageing populations has focused heavily on savings to bring down unit labour costs, fiscal deficits, and old-age dependency ratios. One of the clear policy lessons of the Great Recession is that fiscal consolidation – especially in Southern Europe – effectively deepened the recession. The misguided assumption of a supposed trade-off between welfare spending and economic growth precluded social investment reforms needed to update welfare models to support productivity and labour force participation. It is imperative to acknowledge that there is no negative relation between social spending and economic growth or competitiveness; quite the opposite. As shown in Figures 1 and 2 below (we are grateful for the support of Daniel Alves Fernandes of Leiden University in compiling all figures), Europe’s big welfare spenders do better on growth per capita and score better on competitiveness indicators precisely because they support productivity and employment.

What matters for a better understanding of the relationship between social spending and economic growth is not the size of the expenditure but its composition. In this respect, as we will show in our forthcoming book, EU Member States differ enormously. Those with high employment and high competitiveness, like Denmark or the Netherlands, spend roughly equal shares of their social spending on the young (e.g. education and childcare), the working class (e.g. social protection) and the elderly (e.g. pension spending and long-term care). For Greece or Italy, roughly two-thirds of all social spending is for the elderly, leaving little space to invest in children, support dual-earner families or support the unemployed.

High employment and high productivity go hand in hand with a welfare model based on investing in the young and supporting dual- and single-earner families. This strategy effectively sustains current commitments to the elderly regarding pensions and care. In other words, there is a vast untapped potential for improving economic progress and social well-being across the EU. 

The challenge for European labour markets to adjust to demographic ageing is momentous yet manageable. In demographic projections, it is commonly predicted that ‘old age dependency’ (the ratio of working-age people to those younger and older) will deteriorate in the decades ahead. Invoking a thought experiment, the HLG-report conjectures that this ratio would remain unchanged if the employment rate would trend up to about 85% and if, at the same time, the average retirement age were to rise to 70 years. It is important to underline that these conjectures are not unrealistic, given that today, some member states reach levels of employment close to 80% and voluntary late retirement above the official pension age is common. While labour shortages are becoming more pronounced, roughly 21 per cent of Europe’s workforce remains inactive. European Commission services estimate that bringing all Member States on par with Europe’s top performers would support 17 million women, 13 million elderly or 11 million low-skilled into the labour market (categories overlap). However, to achieve this, welfare states will require transformative change. This is where the policy paradigm of social investment, the core policy recommendation of the HLG, gains purchase.

The social investment-oriented welfare state

In ageing societies, the long-term strength of the knowledge economy is ever more contingent on the contribution that social policy can make to the productive economy. This is best understood by taking a life-course perspective. Secure retirement critically depends on how people fared during their working lives, which, in turn, is strongly correlated with the quality of their childhood years. Effectively, there is a ‘life course multiplier’ logic at work, whereby cumulative social policy returns, reaped over the life course, generate a cycle of well-being in terms of higher employment, gender equality, lower intergenerational poverty, higher productivity and growth, and improved fiscal sustainability.

The cycle initiates with early investments in children through good-quality early childhood education and care, which translates into better educational attainment. This, in turn, spills over into higher and more productive employment in the medium term. To the extent that employment participation is supported by work-life balance policies, including affordable childcare and generous parental leaves, this narrows gender gaps in wages and employment, as dual-earner households offer better protection against child poverty. Investing in active and healthy lifestyles, greater access to training and more flexible retirement options make it possible for older people to work longer. Altogether, these policies reinforce higher and more stable and productive employment over the life course, thus supporting a more extensive tax base to sustain overall welfare commitments. In short, the basic logic of ‘the social investment welfare state’ is that to maintain pensions, it is a prerequisite to invest in children!

The logic of the social investment welfare state moves away from the classic conception of the welfare state as primarily serving redistribution. It starts from the basic truism that we all rely on welfare support at different stages in our lives for reasons of health, education, childcare, spells of unemployment, retirement, and old-age care. With welfare beneficiaries being mostly transitory categories, it is more fruitful to analyse how welfare provision dynamically interacts with family demography (gender, fertility), education, and skill formation (effective labour supply and productivity) in relation to the future tax base, especially in times of adverse demography.

From the redistribution angle, a common criticism is that social investment reform would redirect spending away from classic social protection programmes and/or dis-proportionately benefit the already well-off middle classes (so-called Matthew effects). However, as we have shown in a recent report, this is another misconception; countries that do better on social investment also do better on most equity indicators. Adequate and inclusive safety nets are part and parcel of the social investment welfare state and even a precondition for its success. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a stark reminder that safety nets are crucial to preserve demand and employment to allow countries to bounce back swiftly.

Furthermore, as we show in Figure 3, there is no trade-off between spending on capacitating services (including childcare, education and training, active labour market policy, active ageing, and long-term care) and classic social protection spending (on unemployment benefits, social assistance, family benefits, and pensions). Countries that spend more on capacitating social services also commit more resources to social protection.

Finally, social investments, like all investments, bear their fruits in the medium term while needing immediate resources to finance them. This brings us to our second reservation with the Draghi report concerning governance.

Embedding social investment in Europe’s economic governance

While we agree with Draghi’s diagnosis regarding challenges and opportunities, the governance analysis is less convincing. Draghi argues that the European Semester for policy coordination has proven too bureaucratic and largely ineffective and should, therefore, be replaced by a new Competitiveness Coordination Framework focusing on EU-level strategic priorities, with only budgetary rules remaining. We beg to disagree. Over the years, the European Semester has gained intellectual authority in welfare reform guidance in the direction of social investment. The Semester has become a social learning vehicle to foster political ownership with feedback monitoring on reform priorities. While national politics holds primacy in getting reforms over the finish line, Semester’s reform recommendations and reports have, in important ways, shaped and codified the social investment policy turn across Europe. Particularly since the introduction of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), recommendations have been backed up by even stronger domestic commitments conditioned by EU financial resources to deliver. 

Stripping down the Semester to bare fiscal rules would interrupt the social learning process that has been activated in recent years by explicitly linking fiscal rules to public investment and structural reform to achieve medium-term budgetary sustainability. Last March, for the first time, a joint ECOFIN-EPSCO Council meeting met to discuss the potential of social investments to boost economic growth and productivity, much to the merit of the Belgian (and Spanish) Presidency, which – as shown by Vandenbroucke et al. – acted as important agenda-setters. However, there is a need to go further in integrating social investment priorities in the EU fiscal framework.

Hawkish Member States legitimately fear that by labelling (some) social policies as investments, the spending floodgates would come down. On the other hand, if budgets allocated to capacitating social policy continue to be treated purely as a cost, fiscal policy will ignore the positive employment effects of life-course sensitive social investment reform critical for European prosperity and well-being. What is more, the time bomb of adverse demography is ticking. Without social investment now, budgetary strains will only intensify in the medium term. As a first step, the Council has decided on a coordinated effort to measure the returns on social investment. Still, the social investment transition – guided by Semester recommendations – will eventually have to become part and parcel of fiscal-structural plans and debt sustainability analyses. If not, Draghi’s extra billions may go unspent as no qualified personnel can do the work.

Edited Tuesday at 20:12 by Vesper