The Social Costs of the Austerity Agenda

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

28 December 12

s we begin what appears to be the final long, slooooowwww roll down the Gentle Fiscal Incline, it is becoming clear that, among our governing elites, and among the courtier press that serves their interests, it is taken as a given that some sort of austerity agenda, which will not materially affect any of their lives, is going to be dropped on the rest of us, probably for our own good, as that good is defined from some tony little bistro in Georgetown, or from the parlor at Ben and Sally's.

It fails to account for what economists call upper-level substitution bias, and what my mother would call plain common sense: If the price rises for a certain commodity in the basket of goods used to measure inflation, consumers will choose a cheaper alternative. In my house, when the price of beef soars, we substitute chicken.

I suspect the concept of "soaring" as it relates to food prices is rather different in the Marcus house than it is out in the United States Of Ongoing Recession, wherein, when the price of chicken "soars," they can substitute Meow Mix.

As a result, every commission that has examined the issue and endorsed the change has coupled it with additional benefits for the poorest recipients. Opponents of the switch - including AARP and, more convincingly, the National Women's Law Center - insist these protections are inadequate. The administration assures me that, under its approach toward the oldest seniors, the poorest would be shielded and perhaps even better off.

This is courtier reporting at its apogee. All the data and empirical evidence says my idea is bad, but the Very Important People Who Call Me Back say something else, and anonymously, too, so I believe them. Thus do social calendars remain full and lively.

The far left frontier of acceptable Democratic thought is the president's telling us that 'we" all have to make sacrifices, while the far Right frontier of acceptable Republican thought resides somewhere over the horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, and well past the plane of the ecliptic. It's a wonder that, one day, the American political spectrum doesn't keel over altogether to starboard and plunge to the bottom of the Laurentian Abyss. This time it's a bit surprising, though.

Not all that long ago, we had a national election in which the idea that we are all equal partners in the ongoing creative act self-government out of which comes a political commonwealth suited to the needs of the majority of the country was extensively litigated and, at the end of it, the question was decisively settled in the affirmative. Willard Romney's gaffe about the "47 percent" blew out two of the tires on the bandwagon, and then his selection of zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan blew out the other two, and that extravaganza of I-Got-Mine-Jack conservatism that went galumphing through Tampa finally cracked both axles. Then, of course, the whole show moved back to Washington, and became subjct to the gentle ministration of the political elites and the courtier press that serves them, and the definitive decision of the election quickly was forgotten in favor of the notion that some deal, any deal, was better than what lay beyond a completely artificial deadline that had been produced a year ago in response to a completely created crisis. There is no question that some people will get hurt if we roll all the way down the GFI, but, if the president and the Senate do their jobs, the pain will be temporary. The imposition of an austerity agenda as part of some bipartisan "deal" would be infinitely worse.

(And, as a point of relevant historical comparison, let us all pause now and join in a round of applause for the masterpiece of bipartisan Washington "compromise" that was Bill Clinton's welfare "reform" program and its ongoing success out in the country at large. Huzzah.)

The social costs of an austerity agenda - and, certainly, all the available evidence from those European countries wherein one was imposed - are profound. Whether you like it or not, there has been a general political consensus for the paste eight odd decades that a social safety net is one of the legitimate products of that creative enterprise of self-government, that it is part of what we agree to when we form the political commonwealth. To have an austerity agenda imposed from above, and by a relatively unaccountable political elite, and because of the damage done to the nation's finances by an absolutely unaccountable financial elite, is to make an obvious mockery of that political commonwealth, and to do so hard upon an election in which the existence of that safety net was so directly and democratically validated, is to spit in the eye of a self-governing people. This, in turn, will engage all the worst popular instincts, including ill-directed and abandoned popular wrath.

There is a cautionary tale to be told here from the Motherland. An official of the Irish government named Shane McEntee recently killed himself. As with all suicides, there is no one answer to why he did it, but one of the proximate causes certainly was the abuse he'd taken online and elsewhere in the wake of his having made some intemperate remarks in relation to part of the austerity agenda that Ireland adopted in the wake of having most of their national wealth sluiced away a decade earlier through the Great Casino.

In relation to a controversial cut to the respite care grant in the Budget, Mr McEntee, in a newspaper interview said: "You could stay in a top hotel for €700 a week," and added: "People just have to get on with it." As part of the general cut and thrust of national politics,Fianna Fail subsequently issued a statement calling on Mr McEntee to "immediately clarify his callous and crass comments". However, the issue was immediately seized upon by the mostly anonymous contributors to various online websites and forums, who posted a stream of abusive comments directed towards Mr McEntee. It is understood that some of his staff in Leinster House attempted without success to remove or have removed the more vile of the comments posted. Yesterday Mr Farrelly said that he had also briefly discussed the issue with Mr McEntee. "We didn't talk about it that much, other than [for him] to say that 'this respite thing, they are destroying me'," Mr Farrelly said.

That is what is unleashed in the pursuit of austerity, when people are required to have "skin in the game," but no legitimate involvement in the development of the rules of the game itself. (How much different in their lofty detachment are the remarks of the late Mr. McEntee about respite care from that casual toss-off from Ruth Marcus that people who can't afford beef should just buy chicken?) Despite voting against it, we are being fashioned into a nation of casual cruelty anyway. We are being consciously led in that direction. We are not going to like it very much when we arrive.