The dominant view of government spending seems to be “You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it.” Based on this silly notion, battles at the state and national level over cutting government spending have created whole new landscapes of madness and mendacity. The victims of this debt panic are the young, the sick, the disabled, the old, the disadvantaged, and all the others with little power to protect themselves—including the creatures of land, water, and air.
I’d like to bring your attention to the health consequences of this era of government austerity. Cuts to Social Security and Medicaid are obvious—although there are many who think keeping people out of the hands of the medical system might keep them out of harm’s way and so actually improve health. But the other assaults will cause short-term and long-term increases in illness and injury—many lasting generations. Among these are the assaults on income and social support, environmental and occupational protections, and support for education.
Here’s a secret that no one is talking about: there’s no debt crisis. Yes, the US government has a significant amount of debt. In fact, it’s the greatest since World War II. But a debt crisis occurs when the debt can’t be paid. Right now, because of historically low interest rates, the government is paying very little to service its debt.
So the debt crisis is entirely fabricated by those who want to shrink government, New Deal and Great Society programs in particular. This is a movement to return to the working conditions of the 19th Century. The reason is this.
Capitalist economies experience recessions and depressions as regularly as clockwork—historically, the cycles last about 7 years, boom to bust to boom. During the boom, businesses spend like crazy, hiring people, buying raw materials, and building production capacity. Eventually, someone has as much product on their hands as they can sell. They stop expanding. Then others stop. To continue making a profit, businesses have to cut back: they fire workers, stop buying raw materials, production capacity stands idle. Eventually, many (although importantly not all or even most) stop producing and spending altogether. They wait for conditions to improve, which means costs have to get low enough so a profit can be squeezed out of the products sold.
It’s a game of chicken. No one wants to go first because no one wants to lose money. Something has to happen to end the bust. In the 19th Century what happened was that workers became so desperate that they’d work for next to nothing. In other words, booms rose from the misery of working people.
The New Deal changed that. Business had caused the so-called Great Depression of the 1930s in the usual way. But because working people had become politically powerful through the union movement, business was no longer able to simply wait for people to suffer enough to go back to work at low wages. Instead, the government intervened.
Since the 1970s, a right-wing movement has worked tirelessly and successfully to return the conditions of business and work to those of the 19th Century. One objective is to make the life of ordinary people insecure and at the mercy of employers. I emphasize that this is not an unfortunate side effect. It’s the desired effect. They have done so in the name of individual initiative and prosperity. They, quite logically, infected the Republican Party and over time have infected an increasing portion of the Democratic Party, the party of the New Deal and the Great Society.
It is disgraceful that so many in the party of the New Deal and Great Society now repeat the lie that we are in a debt crisis. It is disgraceful that they repeat the lie that heaven and earth must be moved to eliminate the debt crisis, even if it means destroying the health and well-being of tens of millions of people.
How could any decent human being do such a thing?
A recent study about how people figure out what’s fair suggests an answer: cognitive dissonance. If you act in a way that is self-serving but you think of yourself as a generous person, you’ll feel bad about yourself. To avoid that, you’re likely to either ignore the consequences of you action or invent a narrative that keeps your self-image remains in tact.
Researchers asked how a person regarded the fairness of a financial transaction based on information about how the transaction affected the well-being of others. The key to the experiment was that the participants chose whether to know about the effect of the transaction. In other words, someone could decide to act in ignorance.
What the researchers found was that about 15% (1 in 7) always want to know about the effects, about one quarter don’t care about the effects even if they know what they are, and 60% don’t want to know. That is, almost two thirds chose to remain ignorant of the consequences of their actions.
Based on testing they conducted, the researchers explain what happened as an avoidance of cognitive dissonance. The 60% acted selfishly but didn’t want to feel bad about themselves.
The political elite is currently dominated by the one quarter who just don’t care. They’re aided and abetted by the 60% who don’t want to feel bad about themselves. As a consequence, many, many people are going to suffer.
Instead of “You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it,” I recommend “If you can solve a problem with money, you’re lucky.” You just have to have the courage to tax the rich.
