I read quite a bit of European analysis of the economic situation there while I was following the lead-up and immediate aftermath of the French and Greek elections this past weekend. What really struck me about it was how everything was divided into a growth camp and an austerity camp. I don’t know how conservatives there let this happen, because I’ve never met anyone (other than a cancer patient) who would think austerity sounds better than growth. The two words are not on an equal footing. In the United States we talk, instead, about stimulus vs. debt-reduction. You’d think people would favor stimuli, but maybe we’d do better by “arousing” the economy. Someone ask Frank Luntz.
My point here is that in Europe there really isn’t any dispute that paying your bills comes at the cost of immediate economic growth. But here in the States, the Republicans insist that austerity creates growth. They deny that these two things stand in any opposition to each other. Or, as David Brooks puts it:
“Unlike the cyclicalists, we structuralists do not believe that the level of government spending is the main factor in determining how fast an economy grows.”
…
“Running up huge deficits without fixing the underlying structure will not restore growth.”
I don’t think German Chancellor Angela Merkel has the balls to make such a shameless argument. Her position is that Germans shouldn’t have to take their money and hand it to Spaniards and Greeks just because they ran their economies into the ground. In our context, we might say that the people of Connecticut and New Jersey, who pay the most in taxes, shouldn’t have to give their money to the people of Alabama and Mississippi who pay the least. But, that’s not how our politics work, because we mostly take the “United” part of United States seriously. Instead, we focus on the injustice of taking money from rich people and using it to pay for roads, medical care, education, and the bills we’ve already rung up in the sands of Mesopotamia and Jalalabad.
Another way of looking at it is that Angela Merkel is telling the struggling countries of Europe to pay their goddamned bills to the people who loaned them the money. No one is telling anyone to do that here. The GOP would rather we default on our debts than that people pay our bills. Instead, they want to cut taxes on rich people even more while imposing austerity on everyone else.
Never mind that it doesn’t make sense to dry up the funds in the treasury when you’re trying to pay your bills. Never mind that austerity kills growth.