Like any crisis, the coronavirus pandemic has cast an unforgiving light on the chronic failures and superstitions of the status quo preceding it. In particular, the breakdowns in global supply chains, the frayed systems of income support and food aid, and the patchwork-at-best model of employer-subsidized private insurance have vastly compounded the damage coronavirus visits on the human body and the body politic alike.
You’d expect, given this dire object lesson in the delusions of neoliberal policymaking, that the rolling economic and health care calamity we’re now living through would prompt a searching reevaluation of the precepts of market-driven austerity as the dominant model of governance in the developed West and beyond. But as The New Republic’s Zöe Hu notes in a trenchant essay, no such reappraisal is in the offing. Instead, we’re already witnessing a brewing austerity-minded backlash to debt-funded coronavirus rescue efforts that are propping up the flailing global economy. George Osborne, Britain’s former chancellor of the exchequer—now the editor of the Evening Standard—has stepped forward to advocate a round of spending cuts in the wake of the emergency spending now supporting workers and small businesses in the U.K. Germany and other European Union member states have likewise vowed to enact stringent budget cuts once the present crisis has abated, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has called for a halt to further stimulus spending aimed at general relief. The donor and investor class, of course, will continue to look forward to generous tax cuts and cash subventions—even as state and local governments are reeling from the coronavirus lockdown.
If this all feels like a retread of the misguided Tea Party assaults on government spending circa 2010, well, there’s a reason for that, Hu writes. Any time government expansion and debt-financed stimulus measures take hold, the budget-ghoul goes into overdrive:Austerity is, after all, a politics by, of, and for opportunists. It doesn’t take much of a mental journey to recall how, in the wake of the 2008 recession, Tea Party libertarians assailed the existing order by clobbering Obama with budget numbers, only to abandon the obsession with a balanced bottom line once they’d retaken power. Should Joe Biden win in 2020, he can expect that a similar chorus of fiscal hawks will point to a quadrupling deficit in order to block Democrat-led spending. For politicians protecting fossil fuel interests, the debt we have now incurred offers another justification for why the U.S. can’t afford to waste money on lavish things like fighting climate change.And just as the orthodoxies of austerity hamstrung effective stimulus and reform measures a decade ago, so has the premature embrace of cost-cutting agendas produced some painfully savage inequalities in the wake of the coronavirus bailouts a decade later:Reluctance to spend on basic public services has already placed the postal service on the chopping block, just in time to head off the possibility that universal vote by mail might allow enough Americans to participate in their own democracy to vote the austerians out of office.
The outlook is even grimmer on the state and local levels, where deficits are less tolerated (partially because of the prevalence of state-level balanced-budget amendments with which governments must comply). Governor Andrew Cuomo just culled $400 million from New York hospitals, while also giving his budget director, Robert Mujica, the power to make any cuts he wants down the line. And while a Federal Reserve program to buy state and local debt seemed like a promising relief measure, it currently excludes cities with less than one million inhabitants, which include the 35 American cities with the highest black populations.Behold, in other words, the zombie legacies of austerity regimes past, weaponized anew in the face of an already devastating crisis. Perhaps our policy elites can at last be awakened to this destructive and perverse turn in our political thinking, and we can achieve some desperately needed social distancing from the austerity ghouls poised once more to cash in on the misery of the world at large.—Chris Lehmann, Editor |
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