Op-Ed | The Austerity Myth
by Susan Bigelow | Jun 15, 2012 10:30am
(9) Comments | Commenting has expired
Posted to: Opinion
There’s a street near where I work in Springfield where you can walk past a huge grassy lot, separated from the street by a chain link fence. If you look through the weeds and overgrowth you can see the ruins of a neighborhood. A year ago a tornado whipped through this place, which used to be a complex of low-income housing. It has yet to be rebuilt, as do many damaged buildings and homes all over the city.
This week came the news that the Springfield Library is closing branches in addition to the severely reduced hours under which they’re already struggling. Budget cuts, reduced property values, and a lack of aid from the state are to blame. It’s another blow for a city that’s taken too many of them during the last year. Worse, this is Massachusetts, where unemployment is actually pretty low and times aren’t all that bad. There’s still a desperate lack of money to do the things that need doing. Can you imagine how bad it would get if the reins were tightened even further?
Meanwhile, Connecticut’s Republican candidates for U.S. Senate, former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays and former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, met in a contentious debate on Thursday. Beyond the nonsense about whether running a wrestling empire makes a person morally fit for the U.S. Senate, both candidates spent the first half trying to convince voters that they were the one who would fire more federal workers, cut more programs, and generally slash spending as much as possible. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney agrees. He’s come under fire recently for attacking the notion of hiring more teachers, policemen, and firefighters.
I’m bothered by this, because it seems thoughtless to me. This is what’s left of conservative economics, the complex legacy of Reagan and Goldwater reduced to nothing but cuts. The people who are listening to the Republican candidates, nodding their heads along in approval, are in for a rude shock if these policies are ever actually implemented. Firing social workers, bureaucrats, teachers, librarians and policemen doesn’t lead to economic prosperity. Cutting social services and Medicare doesn’t lead to prosperity, either, nor does cutting the military budget — ask Groton about that, if you dare.
All that the plans of indiscriminate budget cutters will do is drive us deeper into economic pain. The economic crisis of 2008 was a terrible storm, and we’re still trying to rebuild. Cutting back on government spending now would add to our burdens, not relieve them.
If you want proof, take a look across the water. European nations, faced with an unprecedented fiscal crisis, decided to embrace austerity. Their economic implosion is being felt here, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon. The United Kingdom recently fell back into recession. Budget cuts are clearly not working there.
Austerity seems like a great idea at first. After all, that’s what we do when times are tough, right? We tighten our belts. But government isn’t like a single household or small business. Governments interact in complex ways with the economy and society, and cutting back indiscriminately can be a disaster.
This should be obvious: government jobs aren’t a special category of job that somehow is walled off from the rest of the economy. Cutting workers leads to unemployment. Slashing salaries means fewer dollars available to buy from stores. Constant budget cuts means we can’t rebuild our cities when disaster strikes. Slashing funds for libraries, schools, and social services means our workforce is less and less prepared to deal with changing conditions, and our society becomes a little more than a shadow of what it could have been.
When cuts do happen, they often come at the expense of people who are too poor to fight back as they are too busy working to make ends meet. Cuts get handed down from federal to state to local, ending up landing on neighborhood libraries where kids go after school to get help with their homework. Homes destroyed by storms don’t get rebuilt. School budgets get slashed. Arts and music disappear. Public college tuition goes up. Social workers vanish. Class sizes increase. Life gets worse for the lower and middle classes, and the promised pay-off, an economic revival, never materializes. After all, how can candidates claim to be creating jobs when they’re cutting them?
This is where the thoughtless austerity leads and both Linda McMahon and Chris Shays seem to be espousing it. We ought to be wary. Our goal should be smarter, more effective government, not simply less government. We should want to rebuild our broken neighborhoods and keep our libraries open, instead of giving up and trying to forget they exist. There are smarter ways to streamline and modernize government, but we have to overcome the force of austerity and economic disaster before we can do that.
Susan Bigelow is an award-winning columnist and the former owner of CT Local Politics. She lives in Enfield with her wife and their cats.
Tags: Chris Shays, Linda McMahon, budget cuts, Susan Bigelow, austerity, dh
(9) Comments
posted by: judgejoyce | June 15, 2012 6:31pm
Very well said! I wonder how many voters would want their child’s class size increased to 25 or 30 students as such cuts are implemented. When the cuts hit home the very folks who vote for these candidates will be the first to complain.
posted by: GoatBoyPHD | June 17, 2012 1:29am
Lived in Springfield during graduate school. The Western Mass should secede argument was popular then given the political climate of Boston and austerity.
The city was in receivership then (what else is new?). What a mess. Half the council went on to get arrested in later years, the police were caught vandalizing a a Black councilman’s car (Moe Jones opposed raises), and the Hispanic gangs were trying to displace the Black Gangs in the south end and doing the drive by shooting thing. 13 deaths in 2 years within 200 yards of my apartment and I had enough austerity and Massachusetts.
Austerity and we’ll see a return to that era (that was Bill Weld at the time in the recession of 1992).
There are two good bills before Congress to re-create the WPA and CCC emphasizing labor intensive projects. $300 billion a year paid by a millionaires tax.
In theory CT would get $4.5 Billion on a per capita distribution.
Would I trust CT state politicians to handle the funds? Not on my life. It would either have to be Federal Administration or better yet passed on to each Mayor. A city of 50,000 would see $60 million or so. Spent purely on labor that’s 3,000 $10 an hour jobs paying $20,000 a year. That plus free Husky Care and a married couple both working could eke out a tax-free living.
If it went to state Government the NEA, AFT, SEIU, and AFSCME would be all over the money as well as the special interest groups represent the Capital region non-profits. Outlying cities would see squat and the overhead and union vig would be enormous. Job creation would be a sham.
So yes, austerity is a mistake. So is State government and the hold of special interests on our tax dollars.
Smarter government would be a National ID Card as an EBT card. Everything goes straight from Federal government to the individual where possible . A minimum income plan replacing food stamps and Section 8. Categorical spending limits on schooling (electronic vouchers for school and medical insurance).
Take the politics and unions right out of the whole system.
We’ll never see a system that streamlined. Today’s liberals are enchanted with public sector union vig and as much of it as they can build into the budget.
posted by: Tim White 1 | June 17, 2012 1:52pm
You address fiscal policy, but ignore monetary policy.
If we continue increasing our debt, is there a point at which others will stop loaning to us? There certainly is a point where they’ll demand higher interest rates. The USDs saving grace has been the fact that it is the world’s reserve currency.
But the USD will not remain the world’s reserve currency in perpetuity. China not only opened Yuan deposit accounts on US soil this year, as of June 1st they began direct currency exchange (renminbi for yen) with Japan. That is one of many steps that will end USD hegemony in the coming years.
I’m not saying any of this will happen overnight. But this stuff is happening. And your argument is incomplete if you do not simultaneously address monetary policy.
posted by: joemanc | June 17, 2012 9:18pm
So basically, you are saying we need to go deeper in to debt to keep all of the programs we couldn’t afford in the first place, which caused all that debt to accumulate? My oh my, when will we learn? 2 years ago when I moved to my town, the voters voted down the budget because it contained a tax increase. They voted it down a 2nd time, this time, it was a flat budget. Only on the 3rd try, when taxes were cut, did the budget pass. This year, we cut the budget again. And the town is just fine. One of the best school systems in the state. If my town can live within it’s means, then every town needs to live within it’s means.
posted by: ocoandasoc | June 18, 2012 12:04am
There is only one group that’s worse than the “thoughtless austerity” folks: The “Banana Fish” (Salinger reference) politicians who engorge themselves and their supporters during times of prosperity with superfluous and inefficient programs paid for with future tax dollars.
posted by: Alex from Nevis | June 18, 2012 7:30am
At least this otherwise economically ignorant op-ed contains a little fact: “European nations, faced with an unprecedented fiscal crisis, decided to embrace austerity.”
Nations like Estonia and Latvia, among the hardest hit in the economic downturn, slashed public sector spending. The former is experiencing economic growth that is five times the Eurozone average (7.6% in 2011) and the latter is the fastest growing economy in Europe.
The Baltic states’ Grecian pals have not embraced any form of meaningful austerity. The Spaniards and Italians are having trouble doing so as well.
How can this author ignore the cold truth of the European mess? Check your facts!
posted by: Noteworthy | June 18, 2012 7:56am
I’ll agree that the idea of just cutting and austerity as a means of trimming a state or city budget as the only solution is shallow. Equally shallow though is the idea that smart and efficient state government is possible without cutting people and programs. The fact is state employees have a rich benefit package that outsizes anything in the private sector in addition to salaries that outsize us as well. And the management structure in state government resembles more of an adult daycare than it does an effective tool of the people. Add to those issues is a governor and legislature who not only don’t cut spending, they increase spending by a billion dollars and debt by nearly $2 billion.
You don’t think that’s a problem?
posted by: Greg | June 18, 2012 10:08am
It’s one thing to whine about “austerity” and another to whine about it and propose a solution. For a fairly thoughtful op-ed, I am disappointed that we didn’t get an alternative plan to not cut programs, not tighten the belt, etc.
You talk about thoughtless austerity but no comment on thoughtless spending or thoughtless projects or thoughtless bond issues or thoughtless debt service payments or thoughtless longevity bonuses…and the list continues.
posted by: RE-Windsor, CT | June 18, 2012 7:29pm
When I read how we can’t lose Government Jobs, or that austerity is bad, and it hurts the poor the most, I smile and think to myself if we only lived in a utopian world… and then I realize that Communism is that type of utopian world, and it has consistently proven a failure hurting the underclass the most.
Wisconsin seems to be doing better after making major changes in the structure of public service. Why? MAybe we should contemplate the fact that arguably the unions support Democrats at the expense of everyone else. Follow the money and the people. Facts are hard to refute.
Wisconsin, San Diego and San Jose are just the beginning.