If you've been paying attention this past decade, it won't surprise you to learn that the country's policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking....
....we face a joblessness crisis that threatens to pitch us into a long, ugly period of low growth, the kind of lost decade that will cause tremendous misery, degrade the nation's human capital, undermine an entire cohort of young workers for years and blow a hole in the government's bank sheet. The best chance we have to stave off this scenario is more government spending to nurse the economy back to health. The economy may be alive, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. There's a reason you keep taking antibiotics even after you start to feel better.
And yet: the drumbeat of deficit hysterics thumping in self-righteous panic grows louder by the day....
This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation--if it can be called that--about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable--Saddam Hussein--became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost....
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity-about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it.
Let me rub a little salt in the wound: if the Iraq parallel is any guide, even after everything has gone wrong, and the US economy has slid into a deflationary trap; even after most people concede that austerity was a mistake; still, only those who went along with the mistake will be considered "serious", while those who argued strenuously against a disastrous course of action that "everyone" supported will continue to be considered flaky and unreliable.
But, of course, it's not just Iraq & the debt. Indeed, what's difficult is to find an example where this pattern doesn't hold. Did the serious people see the housing bubble growing right before thier eyes--much less it's coming collapse? Did they see the financial mayhem that would come on its heels? Did they see Enron for the criminal enterprise that it was--or did they blame California & it's evil environmentalists? Did they do anything about global warming, which is shaping up to be the biggest threat the human race has ever faced? Did they even try to fix our elections after 2000? Or did they try to "fix" them?
Just where, oh where is the counter-example? Where is the problem that the serious people actually recognized and did something effective about?
And let's go meta for a moment here: Has anyone done anything about the appalling death spiral of old fashioned journalism, which failed to warn us about any of these problems? The filibuster? Has anyone done anything about that?
No. We are facing total systems failure, just like Versailles leading up to the French Revolution.
This is not just a matter of individual failing. It's both institutional and inter-instutional. It is systemic. We are the United States of epic fail, the United States of Anosognosia. We are, as a nation, trapped in what Errol Morris so chillingly called it, "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is".
Except, of course, that all us DFHs know exctly what it is. It's the same old elitist aristocratic death grip that we've been struggling against for the past 10,000 years. The "I'm right, you're wrong, God said so, and who the fuck are you to question me?" mentality.
That's what's wrong.
And they're coming after everything we've got left to live on, much less to fight them with.
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