The professional left has a new word to symbolize all that is
bad and wrong with contemporary politics. Joining such past and
present favorites as “Nixonian,” “neocon,” “crypto-fascist,”
“lock-step” and “Koch,” we now have… “austerity.”
Anybody who attended the Take Back the American Dream conference
in D.C. this week, a left-wing version of the right’s annual CPAC
event, could not miss the disgust and fear that the mere mention of
the “A” word caused.
It was ruining Europe, speaker after speaker said, and the rapid
debt reduction the word implied would be ruination of the U.S. too.
Getting the public to understand this has to be a top priority of
the progressive movement.
“Austerity is exactly what happened in Europe in the 1930s… that
gave us fascism and communism,” said AFL-CIO policy director Damon
Silvers.
Now it is true that the word has made a comeback in politics.
But this is no nefarious plot of the right. Anybody who paid
attention during the George W. Bush administration knows that.
Republicans would just as soon spend like Democrats, if for no
other reason than it’s the path of least (political)
resistance.
But as the saying goes: a billion here, a billion there and
pretty soon you’re talking about real money. And real debt.
Trillions of it — $1.5 trillion this year alone, the Congressional
Budget Office
warns.
Most of it is in the very entitlement programs the left loves so
much. And as the case of Europe shows, the welfare state just
cannot grow indefinitely. Eventually that tab either has to be paid
or the spending has to be cut back. Not even confiscatory tax rates
on the rich would change this fact.
And yet the wise men of the left persist in telling their
acolytes that this is not so. That all that is needed is to spend
further. To — yes — spend ourselves into prosperity.
“The problem with the economy is there is not enough spending,”
said New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who was
greeted at the conference as a kind of philosopher-king. He
literally insisted that there was indeed such a thing as a “free
lunch.”
As an aside, he added, “Nobody on the left is saying they want
big government.”
No, no, no that was a myth, Krugman said. They just want a
“government big enough to do certain things.”
The Nobel-prizing winning economist did not give any sense of
how big that government would be or how we would know when we got
there.
For the left this is an existential dilemma. Those entitlement
programs are among their proudest political achievements. Defending
them against any cutbacks is, they are convinced, the sharpest tool
in their political arsenal. Admitting that those same programs may
also be undermining the country as a whole is to make too big a
concession to their critics.
In this setting, even President Obama’s own bipartisan
commission on reducing the debt, which did include tax increases,
was treated with scorn. “The Bowles-Simpson plan, or as I call it
B.S…,” mocked Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.
On this, she was at least following the lead of the president,
who himself abandoned his own commission, opting to instead damn
the Republicans for refusing to hike taxes on the rich.
As far as many were concerned, the U.S. had already tried the
politics of austerity and they had only made things worse. As the
fine folks at Reason magazine and others have pointed
out, this is patent nonsense as the country has never stopped
spending.
But try explaining this to the people who used to refer to
themselves as the “reality-based community”. Instead they’ll argue
with you that regulations create jobs and that the only problem
with the stimulus bill is that it was too small. The collapse in
Europe to them is in no way proof that the welfare state model is
wrong.
At one point in his speech, Krugman confessed that he had a
fantasy that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke kept a “secret
diary” in which he would scribble: “Krugman and all these people
are right.”
Ladies and gentlemen, the left’s leading economic
intellectual.
