“Path To Salvation Doesn’t Pass Through Barbarity”: Bernie Sanders Brings The Anti-Austerity Fight to America
Bernie Sanders is as focused as any member of Congress could be on the struggles of the state he represents, and more generally on the challenges facing working people across the United States.
But that does not mean that the independent senator from Vermont fails to recognize when things are kicking up around the world—especially when those developments have meaning for the fights he is waging in Washington.
So it should come as little surprise that the news from Europe—of a democratic rejection of failed austerity policies—has caught his imagination.
Sanders knows that austerity is not just a European crisis. It threatens America as well. And he is highlighting what his Senate website recognizes as: “An Austerity Backlash.”
The senator is right to be excited that citizens are pushing back.
Sanders says Europe’s voters are sending a message that America’s voters can and should echo: the time has come to reject austerity measures that have unfairly burdened working families, while redistributing ever more wealth upward to millionaires and billionaires.
France on Sunday elected a new president, Socialist François Hollande, who campaigned on a promise to tax the very wealthy in order to free up funds for investment in job creation, education and social services.
Hollande rejects the attacks on unions and cuts to education and public services that have stalled European economies, promising that he will not casually continue the job-killing austerity policies foisted on Europe by bureaucrats and bankers.
There is, Hollande says, “hope that at last austerity is no longer inevitable.”
In Greece, the leader of the Syriza, the radical coalition that as a result of Sunday’s election results has leapt from the sidelines of politics to status as the nation’s second-largest party, is even more blunt in his rejection of austerity.
“We believe the path of salvation doesn’t pass through barbarity of austerity measures,” argues Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras.
Hollande and Tsipras are different players, with different styles and different policies.
Yet, their dramatic shows of strength in Sunday’s voting, along with similarly strong results for critics of austerity running in German state elections and Italian local elections, suggests that voters are fed up with the austerity fantasy that says the best response to tough times is a combination of tax cuts for the rich and pay and benefits for the workers.
What should Americans make of the results?
Sanders knows. The independent senator from Vermont, who has led the fight to preserve education, healthcare and social services funding in the face of proposals by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan and his fellow proponents of an American austerity agenda, says the message sent by European voters can and should be echoed by American voters.
Yes, of course, the accent will be different, as will specific concerns and proposals. America is different from Germany, Greece and France.
But the threat posed by failed and dysfunctional policies is the same.
“In the United States and around the world, the middle class is in steep decline while the wealthy and large corporations are doing phenomenally well,” says Sanders. “The message sent by voters in France and other European countries, which I believe will be echoed here in the United States, is that the wealthy and large corporations are going to have to experience some austerity also and that that burden cannot solely fall on working families.”
Sanders is making the connections, recognizing the importance of a democratic push-back against policies that are as cruel as they are economically unsound.
“In the United States, where corporate profits are soaring and the gap between the rich and everybody else is growing wider, we must end corporate tax loopholes and start making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes,” the senator explains. “At the same time, we must protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Austerity, yes, but for millionaires and billionaires, not the working families of this country.”
Sander is, of course, correct.
Let’s just hope that his message is echoed by other leaders in the United States.
Just as austerity is wrong for Europe, it’s wrong for the United States.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, May 7, 2012
“The Land Of The Not-Free”: Meet Mitt Romney, The Real European
An odd thing happened during Mitt Romney’s victory-lap speech after Tuesday’s Republican primaries: He didn’t once mention the word “Europe.”
The absence was jarring, because Romney’s claim that President Obama is dragging the United States toward a loathsome European-style “social welfare” future has been a staple of the former Massachusetts governor’s shtick ever since he started campaigning in earnest.
It’s always been an easy line for him: Europe, Romney’s audience understands, is the land of the not-free. The continent gave birth to Karl Marx, for crying out loud! Every now and then, socialist political parties actually take power!
But there is a big problem with Romney’s formulation. For the last year or two, Europe has been implementing, in real time, exactly the policies that Romney and congressional Republicans fervently believe are the best strategy for boosting economic growth. It’s called “austerity,” and it means cutting deficits, slashing spending, and chipping away at all those goodies the social welfare state provides.
And guess what? It’s not working. Compared with the United States, Europe is in shambles. Unemployment is rising across the continent. Just this week, the United Kingdom, which has pursued an austerity regime so severe that it makes House Republicans drool with lust, slipped back into recession. In France, the socialist candidate for president (and likely winner), François Hollande, has been campaigning against austerity. Italy’s prime minister, Mario Monti, is expressing qualms. The latest news out of Brussels, according to the Daily Telegraph, suggests “a major shift in economic strategy” as fears spread “that excessive fiscal tightening will inflict unnecessary damage on a string of eurozone countries.”
The evidence keeps amassing. Maybe, just maybe, John Maynard Keynes was right: Cutting government spending in the face of a weak economy is a recipe for further decline. In a startling turnabout, political leaders all over Europe are questioning the merits of austerity and calling for more stimulative policies.
You can see the problem Romney faces, and why he might suddenly be reluctant to utter the word “Europe.” The facts are uncomfortable: Under Obama, the United States has recovered more quickly from the Great Recession than has Europe. Economic growth is steadier, and unemployment is falling faster. But if Romney wins the White House, bringing along with him Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House, he will have the power to do exactly what he says he wants to do: slash government spending and cut the deficit.
It’s a plan that runs the very real risk of sabotaging the economic recovery. It’s a plan, in other words, that would make the U.S. just like Europe.
Romney’s efforts to tar Obama as a fifth columnist for French-accented Really Big Government have been unrelenting. In December, he told voters in Iowa that Obama’s polices “were making us like Europe,” and “I don’t want Europe here.” In January, after winning the New Hampshire primary, he lambasted Obama for wanting “to turn America into a European-style entitlement society.” Just a few days ago, he explained to Fox News that the conservative base would rally behind his candidacy, because “President Obama has taken America in such a different course than we have ever gone as a nation before. We are becoming far more like a European social-welfare state, and people don’t want to see that.”
Never mind that by historical standards Obama’s efforts to strengthen the American safety net do not come close to the transformational efforts of presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, making Romney’s assertion that Obama is taking America on “such a different course than we have ever gone as a nation before” transparently ridiculous. If anyone running for president this year in the United States is a pioneer in European-style liberalism, it’s got to be Romney, the first governor to preside over the creation of a statewide universal healthcare plan. (And for a guy who seems to despise Europe so much, Romney sure seems to enjoy vacationing in France.)
But whatever. Romney’s Europe-bashing rhetoric serves multiple purposes. It labels Obama as something different, a “foreigner,” un-American. It also directly appeals to conservative concerns that the social welfare state is unaffordable. In this vein, unless governments everywhere tighten their belts, balance their budgets and get their ships in order, we’re all headed down the hopeless path of Greece, doomed to bankruptcy and social chaos.
Most importantly, Romney’s opposition to European-style Big Government stakes an implicit position on the great economic debate of our time: How best to spur economic growth?
The stances of the two main camps have been clear for years and endlessly debated by economists and pundits. The pro-stimulus, Keynesian argument holds that the problem afflicting stagnant economies all over the world is a lack of demand. When everyone is worried about their economic future, everyone simultaneously tightens their belt, and the capitalist machine stops in its tracks. Since no one is willing to buy anything, companies can’t sell their goods and services and respond by laying off their employees, and that further exacerbates the overall problem. Under such constraints, only the government has the power to step in and stimulate demand. Once the economy is growing strongly and consistently, only then do you look for ways to balance the budget — a task that becomes much easier when tax revenues are booming again.
The opposing camp, now commonly referred to as “Austerians,” believes the problem isn’t a lack of demand, but a lack of confidence. People are afraid to invest and buy and take risks because they’re worried that high deficits inevitably lead to high taxes, or high interest rates, or general fiscal chaos (or all of the above). And they’re going to hunker down until they’re sure that governments intend to act responsibly, and live within their means.
The Austerian camp’s stance translated into one of the most delightfully mindbendingly oxymoronic proposals to enter the economic policy parlance in years: “expansionary fiscal contraction.” Cutting government spending will boost confidence, which will lead to growth! To get big, one must first get small.
It was all the rage two years ago. Today, not so much. The problem with expansionary fiscal contraction is that when you try it at a time when the economy is stagnant or recessionary, you run a real risk of exacerbating the problem you are trying to cure. Slashing government spending subtracts demand from the economy. Growth slows, tax revenues fall, and suddenly the government has even less to spend, which subtracts even more demand from the economy.
And that’s exactly what appears to be happening in Europe — in countries such as Greece, Italy, Spain and France, and perhaps most intriguingly, in the United Kingdom, where David Cameron’s new conservative government pursued austerity with a vengeance. From the outset, a clamor of voices warned that the risks were huge, and so far, their worries have been validated. On Monday, the U.K. registered its second quarter of economic contraction, the rule-of-thumb definition for a recession.
It’s very rare that one gets a real-time demonstration of how two different economic policies compare, but the numbers are hard to argue with: In the “euro area,” where austerity has reigned, GDP growth has declined for each of the last four quarters. In the U.S. it has risen. In the euro area, unemployment has been rising for a year. In the U.S. , it’s been falling. As Felix Salmon observes, when one compares the United States, the U.K and the euro area, “the tougher and more credible the austerity, the worse the GDP performance.”
The trend lines are far too obvious to ignore, and they have sparked a political counter-reaction that appears to have reached critical mass this week. In Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands, austerity is suddenly out of favor.
Meanwhile, the United States, despite the best efforts of Republicans, never pursued austerity as devoutly as Europe. Which is not to say the U.S. hasn’t tightened its belt at all. Perhaps the most stunning counter-argument to Romney’s accusation that Obama is pushing for a government-centered European-style government can be seen in the decline in the size of the public sector under Obama: During his presidency, employment in the public sector — local, state and federal government — has fallen by almost 600,000 jobs. In comparison, Bill Clinton added over 600,000 and George Bush added 800,000. As Paul Krugman points out, if Obama’s administration had added public sector jobs at the same rate as George Bush, unemployment would currently stand around 7 percent.
But even with those headwinds blowing against it, the U.S. has done surprisingly well. The first guess at GDP growth for the second quarter of 2012, due out Friday morning, is likely to peg growth at around 3 percent. Meanwhile, the most recently available statistics for the euro area show it contracting.
Which leads us back to the all-important question: What happens if Romney wins the election? The chances are good that if he is victorious, he will bring in Republican control of Congress along with him. Anything budget-related can be passed using the congressional technique known as “reconciliation,” which means Senate Democrats won’t be able to filibuster. He’ll be able to do what he wants.
Once upon a time, Mitt Romney supported stimulus spending to boost the economy. But now he sings a different tune. He has endorsed Paul Ryan’s budget, — “It’s an excellent piece of work, and very much needed” — which would combine huge cuts to social welfare programs with dramatic tax cuts for the wealthy — an austerity program directly targeted at the poor. Romney’s speeches are generally devoid of specific policy proposals, but he’s fond of encapsulating his overall economic strategy with the three Tea Party-friendly words “cut,” “cap” and “balance” — the simplest definition of austerity one could ask for. And as he said in Philadelphia on April 12, “The economy is struggling because government is too big, and we have to bring it down to size.”
All together, everything points to a plan for turbo-boosted austerity. That’s exactly the model that Europe has tried and is now finding wanting. And it’s exactly the wrong medicine for a country in which economic growth is still very vulnerable and unemployment is still high.
Wanna be like Europe? Elect Romney.
By: Andrew Leonard, Salon, April 27, 2012
Memo To Speaker Boehner: Time To Get Off “My Way Or The Highway” Hypocrisy
In a wide-ranging speech about jobs and the budget on Thursday, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) trumpeted the worthy goals of cleaning up the tax code and reducing long-term deficits, and he had a few promising words about how to achieve them. “If we want to create a better environment for job creation,” the speaker said, “politicians of all stripes can leave the ‘my way or the highway’ philosophy behind.”
Yet Mr. Boehner also insisted that Congress’s Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction has only “one option”: the Republican way.
President Obama has proposed a jobs plan, but there’s only one job the GOP wants.
Congress should remove inefficient carve-outs, credits and loopholes in the tax code, he said, but “not for the purposes of bringing more money into the government.” Tax increases “are off the table.” “Spending cuts and entitlement reform” are the only ways the joint committee can reach its $1.5 trillion deficit-reduction target.
Mr. Boehner isn’t the only one toughening his stance as the joint committee gets underway. President Obama is retreating from reforms to Social Security that he was ready to consider during the summer debt-limit negotiations. But Mr. Obama still expresses a willingness to reform Medicare, an ideological and political compromise.
Willingness on both sides is essential. Reams of expert studies have found that any deal to significantly reduce long-term deficits must achieve a balance between money-saving reforms to increasingly expensive entitlement programs and a sizable boost in federal revenue. Plans that don’t reflect this balance would fail because their math wouldn’t add up, they wouldn’t be politically durable, or both.
While planning for long-term fiscal sustainability, Congress also cannot risk enhancing economic hardship now by moving too quickly toward budget austerity. Mr. Obama’s recently announced jobs plan seeks to avoid this with new spending and temporary tax cuts that economists say will help guard against a double-dip recession. Here, too, however, Mr. Boehner indicated Thursday that the chances for cooperation with Republicans is limited, saying that he doesn’t favor “short-term gimmicks.”
Poll after poll has shown that Washington leaders’ inability to surrender ideological ground is poisoning Americans’ faith in their national leadership — perhaps even in the very institutions of government. Mr. Boehner and his party should live up to the speaker’s own standard — and leave the “my way or the highway” philosophy behind.
By: Editorial Board, The New York Times, September 16, 2011
The Politics Of Austerity: It’s Not Too Late To Change Priorities
In a statement this morning, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus blamed rising unemployment on “ out-of-control spending.”
Perhaps now would be a good time for reasonable political observers to call this what it is: dangerously stupid.
The latest jobs report is truly awful, and comes just a month after a May jobs report that was nearly as bad. Overall, it’s the worst back-to-back trend in nine months, and in the private sector, the worst two-month stretch since May/June of last year.
The question is what policymakers are prepared to do about it.
When the jobs reports were looking quite good in the early spring, Republican leaders were eager to take credit for the positive numbers they had nothing to do with. Needless to say, GOP officials are no longer claiming responsibility, and are in fact now eager to point fingers everywhere else. It’s a nice little scam Republicans have put together: when more jobs are being created, it’s proof they’re right; when fewer jobs are being created, it’s proof Obama’s wrong. Heads they win; tails Dems lose.
To put it mildly, GOP whining is misguided — whether they want to admit it or not, the economy is advancing exactly as they want it to. The private sector is being left to its own devices; the public sector is shedding jobs quickly; and the only permitted topic of conversation is about debt-reduction.
This is the script the GOP wrote. When it’s followed to the letter, Republican complaints are absurd.
Indeed, the great irony of the 2010 midterms is that voters were angry and frustrated by the weak economy, so they elected a lot of Republicans who are almost desperate to make matters worse.
At this point, the GOP agenda breaks down into two broad categories:
* Ignore the problem: Republicans have invested considerable time and energy into measures related to abortion, health care, NPR, and calling the loyalty of Muslim Americans into question. To date, Republicans have held exactly zero votes on bills related to job creation.
* Make the problem worse: When they’re not fighting a culture war, Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to take money out of the economy, against tax cuts they used to support, and against public investments proven to create jobs, all while threatening to send the economy into a tailspin through voluntarily default. By some measures, the GOP may even be trying to sabotage the economy as part of an election strategy.
We know austerity doesn’t make things better, in large part because it’s not supposed to. That’s the point on austerity — to impose pain and sacrifice, not to grow and flourish. We can already see the results at the state and local level, where officials are forced to cut spending and laying off thousands of public-sector workers. These were preventable job losses, but the congressional GOP refuses to consider state and local aid. Worse, they intend to duplicate the results at the federal level.
It’s not too late. We can boost public investments. The Federal Reserve can stop worrying about inflation that doesn’t exist. We can stop pretending spending cuts can create jobs.
If the politics won’t allow for measures to make things better — if, in other words, Republicans refuse to consider steps to create jobs — then it’s probably time for the public to change the politics.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, July 8, 2011
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