Austerity In the Trenches
Well we have had a long week of budget posturing. The upshot seems to be that no one seriously wants to cut anything. At least the things that actually would have an impact. So far the Republican vanguard, the self appointed tribunes of fiscal discipline, have come up with only $61 billion of cuts. That sounds like a lot until you focus on the deficit. When you put those cuts in context it is trivial. But it sounds good to the hordes massed at the gates of Washington vowing to “take back their country”. From whom I wonder?
Meanwhile Obama has not covered himself in glory. His efforts have been half hearted too. His idea to freeze non-discretionary spending is just silly in view of the fact that it covers just 12% of the total budget. Big deal!
Then there’s the mania for the Simpson-Bowles report which was rightfully ridiculed when it was published a month or so ago, but which has now experienced a remarkable recovery as the go-to guide for what we should do. Except that if you read it there was no substantive content. There was a great deal of “if” this and “if” that. I could have written a report like that a much less cost to the taxpayers. My report would read: “if Congress cuts spending, and raises revenues sufficiently there will be no deficit”. Laugh if you want. That’s pretty much what Simpson-Bowles says.
There is no substance.
Nowhere.
Why? Because when we get to actual cutting and or revenue raising life gets unpleasant. Ideology barges in the front door and politicians vent their previously well disguised pet peeves. Plus it isn’t at all clear that average Americans have a clue what cutting implies to them.
Having spent the best part of three decades demonizing government, and making up fictional stories to scare voters into believing all government expenditure is a scam of some sort – remember Reagan’s famous welfare queen driving an expensive car? there was no such person of course – the Republicans are now faced with reality. In order to cut spending they need to articulate what. That hurts. Which is why the debate in Washington is so hollow. No one wants to confront the voters and say what will be cut. The make-believe is that it will be harmless because, as we all know, government spending is all wasteful. Cutting waste won’t hurt a bit. Will it?
Well, yes it will.
As I, and many others, have been saying, though to no effect, it’s all about health care. We need to revolutionize health care. And we need to defund those parts we can no longer afford. Or at least push it all off the government budget. If the private sector wants to spend unlimited dollars on vanity surgery rather than on productive assets, then so be it. At least we will all look good as we fall further behind the Chinese.
In the absence of anything serious going on in Congress, the real front lines of the new fad for austerity is at the state level. That’s where war has been declared by the new wave of extreme right wing Republicans.
Take Wisconsin.
There the new governor has announced that things are so dire he needs to end the bargaining power of the various unions representing local government workers. Although I notice he sensibly omitted the state police from his list of evil unions. Thus, if he gets his way, teachers will have to negotiate their salaries individually. So will other state employees. This is necessary because, as we all know, state employees, and especially teachers are vastly overpaid, nonproductive and, generally, are layabouts. And we can’t afford them any more.
The new plan in Wisconsin is to reduce teacher salaries and benefits, get rid of some police and firefighters, rein in the excesses of the nurses, and cut back the pensions of those who live off the fat of taxpayer largesse. This will involve “hardships” which fortunately don’t fall on anyone other than the aforesaid workers. Apparently, because all government spending is a waste, none of the good voters of Wisconsin will notice a drop off in services. Life will go on as before.
Those increases in class sizes, those teacher retirements, those slower firefighter responses, those less patrolled streets, and those unfilled potholes in the roads, will affect no one. Oh. And the lost teachers will only be the bad ones who are lazy. The good teachers will all stay even at lower wages and with lost pensions, because they are so dedicated. And if they leave too? That’s OK because there will be floods of people looking to teach even if the profession is demonized and underpaid.
This all makes no sense. Except if you are a right wing Republican with an ideological blind spot to the realities of the very marketplace you so adore.
It seems to me, and I am no expert in teaching, that to fill vacated teacher spots might involve paying a competitive salary and honoring pension obligations. Maybe not. But I think it will. So this “fix” is a sham. It is an attack on the current workforce and nothing more. Which is why there are so many outraged workers parading this morning outside the doors of the State Capitol.
Then there’s Texas.
Good old Texas. Not so long ago the Economist made a total fool of itself advocating that were we to look for a model for the future of the nation as a whole, we should look no further than Texas. Presumably this was a joke. Among the states of the US Texas ranks 47th in literacy, 49th in standardized pre-college test scores [SAT’s], and 46th in math scores. It ranks 3rd in teenage pregnancies, and 1st in repeat teenage pregnancies. I do not mention its leadership role in pollution, violence and crime because its not relevant. It also has a huge budget deficit, which is embarrassing for Republicans because it has practically no state services, as those ranking suggest. It is a model for “small government”. So when the budget gap yawned wide there was no one to blame but the private sector. And how do we close the budget gap? Not by raising taxes. No sir! Not in Texas. What we do is divert Federal dollars aimed at fixing those appalling education and teenage pregnancy numbers into the general fund. That, and we propose cutting education spending even more. Who needs literacy when taxes can be cut?
This would be fun to watch from afar were it not so sad and self destructive. Plus: Texas is growing so fast that it educates – or rather it fails to educate – about 10% of all the nation’s kids.
Yet I see no anger from parents. What I hear is that the sad state of school performance, and America’s steady decline as a center of educational excellence, motivates them to support attacks on teachers. When I ask where we will find the next generation of teachers, I am told we can expand programs like Teach For America which is a post graduate program that takes highly educated students, gives them rudimentary teaching skills, and sends them off into the inner cities for a couple of years before they go on to law school, business school and so on to make a real living. The economics of this is appalling. We want to rely on what amounts to highly educated migrant workers whose willingness to work for low wages is socially motivated, but which undercuts the wage potential of those who want to make teaching a life long career.
That’s just stupid.
But that’s the sort of thing we are hearing as the austerity war, and the attack on government, begins at the state level.
We are fast becoming a nation so obsessed with the short term, incapable of addressing the real issues, and bereft of ideas, that we are cutting into muscle. We are self consciously diminishing ourselves, simply because we have no imagination and no courage to deal with the things that matter. We have convinced ourselves that the problem is so large we have to give things up rather than expand back to the point we can afford what we used to have.
That’s the legacy of the attacks on government launched by Reagan. It is a small minded, mean spirited, and defeatist approach.
Apparently America wants to cut itself down. At least that means the Chinese don’t have to bother.
Addendum:
My source for the Texas information was a column by Gail Collins in the New York Times.
