Rich People Things When They Say "Everyone" Must Sacrifice, They Mean Poor People by Chris Lehmann on November 15th, 2010
There is no spectacle quite so stirring as the pundit swaggering to the bar of public opinion to deliver a good and shrill scolding. So let us tend to the chastisements of Washington Post columnist David Broder—recently heard hailing an invasion of Iran as an economic stimulus measure—as he now urges the stiff medicine of the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan on a feckless American public. Broder is, after all, the dean of American political journalists (though I’ve always found this locution puzzling, since so few political journalists actually seem to graduate—and perhaps more to the point, when was the last time anyone reported an actual dean saying anything remotely relevant to anything outside his or her own chosen bureaucratic warren?) But let such caviling pass: Deans are also in the business of study-body discipline, so let’s glumly don our letter jackets and shuffle over to his office waiting-room for our paddling. For you see, in Broderland, the noble co-chairs of the president’s debt commission, Erskine Bowles (he of the six-figure Morgan Stanley board salary) and Alan Simpson (he of the decades-long crusade to decimate Social Security) are administering “the equivalent of a cold shower after a night of heavy drinking.” Never mind that, in structural terms, there’s no evidence that the sizable $1.4 trillion federal deficit represents anything all that intoxicating—indeed, it is much more in the nature of a desperate defibrillator session than a giddy bender. Our present deficit—which is already shrinking, by the way—largely represents necessary efforts to spark consumer demand amid a world-historic economic slump. And far from incidentally, it also reflects the legacy of the longer-term fiscal chicanery of the Bush years, which kept two major tax cuts, two wars and an enormous expansion in Medicare benefits largely off the books. Never mind as well that the rhetoric of deficit hawks—almost always conceived as a respectable draping for the usual D.C. entitlement brigandry—translates, amid present conditions of contracting demand, into disastrous economy policy. “Our biggest problem isn’t the size of pending federal budget deficits or debt but an anemic recovery that may drag on for years,” writes former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “If Congress and the president started right now to cut the federal deficit—slashing spending and raising taxes on the middle class—our anemic economy would quickly become comatose.” No, our dean won’t be detained by such mere empirical concerns. Math is hard—and more to the point, the resolve of discipline-minded public servants is so inspiring! full: http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/when-they-say-everyone-must-sacrifice-they-mean-poor-people _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
