Why do they love austerity so much?
by digby
Gaius Publius at Americablog discusses Paul Krugman’s column this morning, in which the shrill one very unpolitely points out that austerity has been a failure in every instance where it has been tried.
Gaius has a theory why it is still being pushed in various quarters in Europe and the Unites States:
This is what James Galbraith calls “the predatory state” — and he means that economically. The predatory state is a state that enables and is controlled by economic predators, extremely wealthy vampires who feed on their fellow citizens. Galbraith (my emphasis):
That the looming debt and deficit crisis is fake is something that, by now, even the most dim member of Congress must know. The combination of hysterical rhetoric, small armies of lobbyists and pundits, and the proliferation of billionaire-backed front groups with names like the “Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget” is not a novelty in Washington. It happens whenever Big Money wants something badly enough.
Big Money has been gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for decades – since the beginning of Social Security in 1935. The motives are partly financial: As one scholar once put it to me, the payroll tax is the “Mississippi of cash flows.” Anything that diverts part of it into private funds and insurance premiums is a meal ticket for the elite of the predator state.
By “elite” of the predator state, Galbraith means “owners” of the predator state, the top predators themselves. It’s that predatory feeding that produces policies, promises and pronouncements like these that Krugman describes:
Not only have we been ruled by fear of nonexistent threats, we’ve been promised rewards that haven’t arrived and never will.
They’ll say and do anything to get at more dollars; they’ll destroy the planet’s ability to support life itself, all for more dollars. Look again at the chart above. They’ve been looting the country, the government, the schools, the pension plans, your wages, the equity in your home, everything they can get their hands on since Reagan Days. Their only goal — All your money are belong to us. These are true monomaniacs, in the clinical sense.
So yes, they’re self-deluded. But like every feral beast, they also know where the food is. That food is us unless we stop them. And stopping them starts (in my most humble opinion) with naming them and shaming them.
I only wish the naming and shaming would be enough. Unfortunately, we are living in a world of alternate narratives in which everyone chooses their own heroes and knaves and I’m afraid that our own little cult of austerity nay-sayers and 1% shamers will only be vindicated (if we ever are) long after we are dead. Still, we should name names (and he does) if only for the record.
Meanwhile, it’s up to us to do what we can to mitigate this problem. Call your congressperson and tell him or her that you want them to repeal the sequester. Period. We have already enacted 2.3 trillion in budget cuts at exactly the wrong time and the economy contracted in the last quarter. We certainly don’t need to do any more cutting. We need more spending.
(And exchanging cutting in the near term for long term cuts to Social Security and Medicare is not going to help. If we are dealing with a problem in demand, then telling near term retirees and retirees that they are facing cuts down the road to their already subsistence level incomes is hardly likely to result in a surge in spending. Just saying.)
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