Economy

US social safety net in peril

By Nathan Place (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2011-06-10 12:47

The only real connection, which Republicans have exploited with some success, is not logical, but emotional. Many Americans, because of the recession, really are "broke" right now - not because of the national debt, but because they're unemployed. So when Republicans talk about "ruin" and "crisis" and "catastrophe," those things may be completely hypothetical, long-run problems for them, but for many of the people listening to them they are a current and painful reality. Republicans have exploited not the facts, but the feelings of a national recession to push forward an agenda that not only has nothing to do with ameliorating that recession, but would make it worse in practice.

But let's not pretend they care about the debt either. For Republicans, the purpose of cutting social spending is not to reduce the deficit or the debt. The purpose is to cut social spending. Back in the Bush years, when Republicans were big on waging unfunded wars in the Middle East and giving hugely expensive tax cuts to the rich, none of them worried about the massive debt they were ringing up. That's because it was a key part of a strategy called "starving the beast," which essentially means impoverishing the federal government through tax cuts and debt until drastic budget cuts - or tax increases (off the table) - are necessary to balance the budget. And of course, Republicans direct those cuts to the programs they like least.

The problem for Republicans is the "beast" is popular with voters. Americans may complain in the abstract about deficits and debt, but as we've seen in recent weeks, they like their Medicare. So to get the public's permission to starve it, Republicans are using the same bait-and-switch strategy they used to get us into Iraq:

Step 1: Exploit a national calamity (9-11/the recession) to fan voters' fears.

Step 2: By conflating different issues, channel those fears from their original object (terrorism/unemployment) to a less relevant, more politically useful object (Saddam Hussein/the national debt).

Step 3: Offer a policy (war with Iraq/cuts to social spending) that, for the moment, appears to solve both problems, because at this point no one is thinking straight. If Step 3 makes the original problem worse, return to Step 1 and repeat.

This strategy worked in 2003. Will it work this time? Maybe not. Democrats have begun to call the Republicans' bluff on their efforts to "save" Medicare, and the victory of Democratic congresswoman Kathy Hochul shows that defending that program can win elections.

But if it does work, the danger is it could work again. Americans may not see the failure of "starve the beast" economics as easily as they saw the absence of "weapons of mass destruction" (another phrase that conflated different things) in Iraq, and if Republicans do get their way on the budget, they could conceivably use a worsened, post-budget-cuts economy to justify further cuts, and just keep starving the beast until there’s nothing left. At that point it will be too late - or, to use another phrase I heard somewhere once, the smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud.

The author is an editor at the China Daily Website.