“A Means, Not An End”: Austerity As A Bridge To Nowhere
Economic austerity is a dangerous, self-defeating intellectual fad. Perhaps I should say that’s what it was, given Sunday’s election results in Europe. Perhaps I should also say good riddance.
Voters in France, Greece and even Germany — a hotbed of the austerity cult — told their political leaders, in no uncertain terms, that boosting economic growth is more important than cutting government spending. Here in the United States, I hope that Democrats, at least, were paying attention; I fear that the addled ideologues who control the Republican Party will never get the message.
On Sunday, French voters elected Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande as president, ousting center-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in what amounted to a referendum on Sarkozy’s embrace of austerity.
Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed on a common policy of budget cuts and partial “reform” — a euphemism for “dismantling” — of the welfare state. This, they decided, was the way to return Europe to prosperity and save the European Union’s common currency, the euro, from collapse.
But on Sunday, even Merkel got a message from voters: Her party was punished in local elections in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where it appeared that a center-left, anti-austerity coalition would end up in control.
Also on Sunday, voters in Greece tried their best to say no to austerity. For them, sadly, it’s probably too late. The fiscal and debt crises there were so acute that the Greeks, from the start, have had only painful choices.
One obviously bad option would have been to withdraw from the euro, default on a mountain of debt and slowly climb back from a deep economic depression. Officials in Athens decided to go with a worse option — stay with the euro, impose draconian austerity, muzzle anyone who utters the word “default” — that also sent the country into a deep economic depression with no apparent way out.
Yes, one lesson from the Greek experience is that there are limits. There is a point at which deficits become too large, debt too crushing and social spending too generous. The lifestyle a nation enjoys must bear some relationship to what that nation produces.
But another clear lesson is that austerity has to be seen as a means, not an end. The goal is to recover from the massive blow inflicted by the global financial meltdown and return to prosperity. This may involve a measure of austerity — but definitely requires considerable economic growth, which should be policymakers’ first priority.
The reason is simple: If you can get the economy growing again, all other aspects of the crisis become more manageable. Debt and deficits shrink as a percentage of national output. Unemployment declines, as does the need for social spending.
But putting a chokehold on government spending at a time when economies are just sputtering back to life — as the austerity fetishists have tried to do in Europe, and as Republicans solemnly pledge to do in the United States — is monumentally self-defeating. Governments end up magnifying the constituent parts of the economic crisis, not minimizing them.
In Britain, the economy was growing when Prime Minister David Cameron took office two years ago. Adhering to the platform of his Conservative Party, Cameron took the austerity route with a host of gloom-and-doom budget cuts. Now unemployment is rising and the economy has slipped back into recession. Nice job, Tories.
That loud chorus of “Duh!” you just heard came from the many leading economists who have been screaming at political leaders for years now that we’ll never cut our way out of this economic slump and instead must grow our way out. It is obvious that deficits, debt loads and entitlement spending have to be brought under control — but equally obvious that the necessary adjustments should be made when the economy is going great guns, not when it’s gasping for air.
It should be noted that there are some economists who disagree. They argue that draconian cuts in government spending will somehow awaken the animal spirits of private-sector executives, entrepreneurs and financiers. They further argue that austerity is needed to combat the scourge of inflation, although the best term to describe inflation in today’s economy is “imaginary.”
Mitt Romney and the GOP subscribe to the pro-austerity view. They are, of course, entitled to their opinion, even if it happens to be wrong. I sincerely wish them all the electoral success their ideological allies are having across the Atlantic.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 7, 2012
“Unreasonable Benighted Yahoo’s”: Why Mitt Romney Can’t Tell The Crazies To Get Lost
In the cliché of the season, Mitt Romney is supposed to be executing a graceful “pivot” away from the grating extremist stupidity of the Republican primaries, the better to persuade us that he really is a Massachusetts moderate, or a moderate conservative – or at least something less repellent to independent voters than a Tea Party yahoo. He stumbled in mid-pivot, however, when a woman posing a question to him at a Cleveland event on Monday said President Obama “should be tried for treason,” and Romney acted as if he didn’t hear her slur.
The presumptive nominee told reporters afterward that “of course” he didn’t agree with the woman’s remark — as if he had failed to check a box on a form — but his alibi was too late and much too little. When someone slanders the President of the United States as a traitor, the responsible reaction is to respond loudly and forthrightly. Shrinking from the duty to correct the extremism of your own supporters, as Senator John McCain did without hesitation four years ago, is yet another sign of weak character and poor judgment.
Romney’s instinct is to appease the same far right forces that his father George and other conscientious Mormons broke with many years ago, although such fringe ideological obsessions held sway at the highest levels of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. He is entirely familiar with the John Birch Society paranoia and white supremacist bigotry that notoriously defaced Mormonism in those times, both of which exert an unwholesome influence on Tea Party Republicans today. Somehow, he cannot bring himself to speak up when confronted with that old nightmare mentality.
Instead Romney consistently seeks to ingratiate himself with anyone who expresses a distaste for Obama, no matter how demented. The same scenario has recurred again and again, as it did in the town of Bexley, Ohio in early March, where a man who claimed to have a concealed-carry permit asked whether the former Massachusetts governor will “allow me to keep my gun and protect myself and my family and my home and not come and get my gun? Because I want to keep it to protect myself and my wife and my family — and against a tyrannical government, which I think we are approaching and we are in, very close.”
While blandly answering that he “believes in the Second Amendment,” Romney failed to reassure this poor character that we are not, in fact, on the brink of tyranny. Is that what he believes? Of course not, he would reply – but why should he be expected to forfeit some crank’s vote by standing up for decent discourse?
The problem is not that Romney is missing opportunities to reach the benighted yahoos in his party, who are mostly beyond reason. It is that he lacks the fortitude to do so when he thinks honor and honesty might cost him. And it means that if the cranks continue to dominate Congress, as they do now, no moderating voice will emanate from a scared and silent Romney White House.
By: Joe Canason, The National Memo, May 5, 2012
“The Bigots Win”: North Carolina Passes Constitutional Amendment Bannig Marriage Equality
Sadly, as predicted, voters in North Carolina passed Amendment One, the law that bans already-banned same-sex marriage and tacks on a gratuitous “and no civil unions, either.” As Joan McCarter explained:
There would be no more legal unions between unmarried people, gay or straight. It could take health care benefits away from families, it could take away domestic violence protections, hospital visitation rights, and all the very basic protections of civil unions.
That’s why just about everyone—including North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue, former President Bill Clinton (and his daughter), Episcopal bishops, hundreds of business leaders, religious leaders, and members of both parties—opposed it. Because it’s hateful and wrong. But apparently, the state’s voters disagreed.
Way to go, North Carolina. You must be so proud.
By: Kaili Joy Gray, Daily Kos, May 8, 2012
“Roundabout And Silly”: Paul Ryan Suggests Need To Shred Safety Net Because Rich People Give Politicians Money
“Every other country in the world calls it bribery. We call it campaign financing.”
“That’s BS,” a constituent told Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) during a town hall Friday. “I don’t think you or any of the rest of the politicians want to fix” it, the Wisconsinite declared as the crowd roared with applause.
Ryan, however, was less than sympathetic to their views. He insisted instead that money will always follow power, so because Washington is where policy is made, there is little we can do to mitigate the influence of money in politics. Worse, Ryan even claimed that the rush of corporate and billionaire donations authorized by the Republican justices in Citizens United justifies enacting his draconian budget.
CONSTITUENT: You have all these different things and I look up there and I say none of them will ever work because of one single item we have in our country today, and I don’t think you or any of the rest of the politicians want to fix. It’s called “campaign financing,” which makes special interests. [Crowd applauds.] This country is bought, it’s paid for, it’s gift-wrapped. Supreme Court didn’t help us one bit when they made corporations humans, now they can dump all this money in. When you dump $16 million into your campaign fund, I own you. You can look me in the eye and say, “oh no, that’s not going to me anything to me.” That’s BS. This is what’s wrong with our country today. We need to get rid of it. Every other country in the world calls it bribery. We call it campaign financing.
RYAN: The point I would make is so long as so much money is going to be handled and run through government, through Washington, there will always be an attempt to influence it. So to me the best antidote is not give all of our money and our power to Washington, keep it for ourselves and our communities so there’s less influence-peddling there in the first place. […] Even under the so-called new clean law that Russ Feingold wrote, even with the Supreme Court ruling that affected parts of that law. So let’s try and have more transparency so you see where the money’s going, let’s not destroy the political parties which are more [inaudible] to elected officials. Right now you have all these groups that pop up and then they go down come the election cycle.
Watch it: http://youtu.be/bKmUcP7pAkg
Ryan’s argument is both roundabout and silly. Rather than fighting to remove the corrupting influence of money on politics, he thinks we should simply pack up our bags and accept draconian cuts to Medicare and Medicaid — because such programs are doomed to be corrupted by the very donations Ryan’s Supreme Court allies authorized in Citizens United. It’s a bit like saying that, rather than banning drunk driving, we should simply tear up all the nation’s roads.
Moreover, he may call for shrinking Washington in order to shrink the influence of campaign money, but even under Ryan’s own budget, the government still spends more than $3.5 trillion. With a budget that size, under our current campaign finance law, the Koch Brothers can spend a few million dollars and get a fantastic return on investment. In modern America, it is impossible to achieve Ryan’s “antidote” of having a national government small enough that those with money wouldn’t be tempted to influence it.
It’s worth noting that, while Ryan also touts transparency as an alternative to keeping big money out of politics, he hardly has credibility on this point either. He was given an opportunity to actually vote on requiring more disclosure, he voted against the DISCLOSE Act. If Ryan now wants groups like Crossroads GPS to be forced to disclose their multi-million-dollar donors, wonderful. If he’s simply using this as a rhetorical sleight of hand to justify unlimited campaign funding from billionaires, as many Republicans are now doing, shame on him.
By: Scott Keyes, Think Progress, May 8, 2012
“A New Low”: Scott Brown’s Campaign Of Hypocrisy And Republican Dirty Tricks
For 50 years now, ever since Dick Nixon taught them how, Republicans have used the same tactics over and over again to try and win elections: attack Democrats as snobby elites and raise questions about issues like affirmative action to try and appeal to working class white voters who tend to be the biggest group of swing voters. With Nixon and Reagan, that at least made political sense even though it was reprehensible, because they both had close personal connections to the working class. But even with the Bush families’ degrees from Yale and long-term family wealth, they still did it. Even with Mitt Romney’s two degrees from Harvard and his great wealth, Republicans are still doing it. And with Scott Brown’s incredible wealth and his campaign team’s close ties to Harvard, they are doing it in their nasty campaign against Elizabeth Warren.
For months, the Massachusetts Republican Party has sent video after video and press release after press release attacking Elizabeth Warren, with great vitriol, for being a Harvard elitist. They have made the accusation in dozens of press releases and videos. Polling shows that the Harvard association doesn’t hurt Warren, but the Republicans keep attacking along these lines because it is the only thing they know how to do. Even though Warren’s biography shows a woman who grew up in a working class family barely hanging on, that she pulled herself up by her bootstraps through her hard work and determination, they are going to continue to try and distract voters from the important economic issues in this race by smearing her with these whispers about affirmative action and accusations of, horror of horrors, getting a job teaching at the school where Mitt Romney got his two degrees.
They so desperately want to do this that they are starting to be downright funny in their tactics: having their campaign chairman Robert Maginn, using his status as a double degree holder from Harvard, demand an investigation of Warren’s history of using affirmative action at Harvard. Given that it has already been attested by her entire interview committee that she didn’t, and given that affirmative action is not a crime even if she had, there is absolutely nothing to investigate. But give them an award for pure silliness: getting their Harvard elitist to pull rank to demand they look into this. The Bushes and Karl Rove must be laughing hard at this one.
Maginn has come under fire before for running a Republican-style campaign of saying anything it takes and does to win — even to the point of encouraging, accepting, and gloating about apparently impermissible corporate donations to the Massachusetts Republican Party. But this is a new low and represents one of the most hypocritical developments yet in a race where Brown’s hypocrisy has already been rampant even for a Republican.
This race is going to have a lot of twists and turns. We can count on only two things. First, we know Elizabeth Warren is going to keep taking on the big Wall Street special interests that are funding Scott Brown’s campaign. Second, we know Scott Brown is going to keep going to the old school, Dick Nixon inspired Republican playbook.
By: Michael Lux, Daily Kos, May 7, 2012
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