Month: June 2012

On Austerity, Learning The Wrong Lessons From Europe

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Europe Austerity 2

 

As the US presidential election draws closer and the political debate rumbles on, I find myself becoming increasingly frustrated by those voices on both the left and the right, who seek to hold up the example of “Europe” (that homogenised, cohesive whole) as Exhibit A in an attempt to win their economic policy argument.

I am talking about the ongoing “austerity/stimulus debate” – whether America should make drastic and immediate cuts to public spending in order to tackle large government budget deficits, or whether even higher levels of government spending are required in the short term to spur economic growth, before deficit-tackling measures are undertaken at some point in the future.

When talking about these issues, both Democrats and Republicans are playing fast and loose with the truth, and doing the American people (at least those who have already tuned in to the election-year political coverage) a disservice in the process.

On the left, it is fashionable to point at Europe and exclaim that austerity policies are not working because “Europe” has drastically scaled back government spending, and yet is experiencing either a very tepid recovery or an outright double-dip recession. A typical example, from The Washington Post:

Europeans are rebelling against austerity. That’s the read on Sunday’s elections in Greece and France. But why do voters loathe austerity? Perhaps because, as economists have found, efforts to rein in budget deficits can take a wrenching toll on living standards, especially in a recession.

In a recent paper for the International Monetary Fund, Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh and Prakash Loungani looked at 173 episodes of fiscal austerity over the past 30 years. These were countries that, for one reason or another, cut spending and/or raised taxes to shrink their budget deficits. And the results were typically painful: Austerity, the IMF paper found, “lowers incomes in the short term, with wage-earners taking more of a hit than others; it also raises unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment.”

The left-leaning media across the pond is also keen to seize on this narrative, as the following opinion piece from The Guardian deftly demonstrates:

Third, the president should make it clear he won’t allow government spending cuts to take precedence over job creation. He won’t follow Europe into an austerity trap of slower growth and higher unemployment. While he understands the need to reduce the nation’s long-term budget deficit, he should commit to vetoing any spending cuts until the unemployment rate in the US is down to 5%. Instead, he should commit to further job-creating investments in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure – pot-holed roads, unsafe bridges, inadequate pipelines, woefully-strained public transportation, and outmoded ports.

Finally, Obama should make sure Americans understand the link between America’s fragile recovery and widening inequality. As long as so much of the nation’s disposable income and wealth goes to the top, the vast middle class lacks the purchasing power to fire up the economy. That’s why the so-called “Buffett rule” he has proposed – setting a minimum tax rate for millionaires – needs to be seen as just a first step toward ensuring that the gains from growth are more widely shared. He should vow to do more in his second term.

Such an economic strategy – forcing banks to help distressed homeowners, stopping oil speculation, boosting spending until unemployment drops to 5%, and fighting to ensure economic gains are widely shared – is critical to jobs and growth. It’s the mirror image of Europe’s failed austerity policies.

These arguments do not stand up to scrutiny for several reasons, many of which are well articulated in this piece from Forbes:

The trouble with Europe’s post-crisis budgets, then, isn’t so much that they’ve increased taxes. It’s that they haven’t meaningfully cut spending. “Following years of large spending increases,” Veronique de Rugy explains, “Spain, the United Kingdom, France, and Greece — countries widely cited for adopting austerity measures — haven’t significantly reduced spending since 2008.” De Rugy points to data that shows those countries “still spend more than pre-recession levels,” with France and Britain making no cuts, and Italy increasing spending in 2011 “more than the previous reduction” between 2009 and 2010. Without significant, substantial cuts, tax increases alone don’t amount to austerity. Yglesias is correct that tax hikes can contribute to austerity. What tax hikes cannot do, however, is be austerity. Tax hikes are neither necessary nor sufficient for an austerity program.

Inconsistent though it may be with the liberal worldview in the US, this is very true. Government spending, by many measures, is actually higher than pre-recession levels in Britain and other countries. The so-called “austerity” that everyone is wailing about is nothing more than a reduction in the rate of increase in government spending. Furthermore, as anyone living in Britain can easily attest, many of the “austerity” measures have been tax increases, and not spending cuts – which also does little to support the liberal view that draconian spending cuts have stymied an economic recovery.

Also missing from the left-wing take on austerity is an understanding of the fact that, unlike the US, European economies grappling with anaemic growth or double-dip recession do not have the good fortune to be underpinned by the world’s primary reserve currency. It is much easier to enact a large scale stimulus programme while retaining the confidence of the global bond markets if your currency is the US dollar, a fact that is glossed over by many people, including some in the Obama administration who hold up Europe as a cautionary tale of what happens if you fail to meet economic downturn with government stimulus.

The Washington Post reports:

“The situation in Europe is slowing things down,” Obama told donors at the New Amsterdam Theatre. At the home of hedge fund executive Marc Lasry, Obama said that Romney and congressional Republicans favored an austerity plan that would “drastically shrink government,” hurting job growth and middle-income Americans.

“That is fundamentally different from our experience in growing this economy and creating jobs,” Obama said.

Where Obama was subtle, not drawing a direct line between Europe’s approach and Romney, Clinton was not.

The former president said Republicans were adopting “the European economy policy.”

As a European watching the American political debate unfolding, it frustrates me to see such sweeping statements and generalisations being made about other countries, and seeing their actions and policy stances mischaracterised without even the pretence of trying to understand them – and this applies to both sides of the political aisle. I also fear that it does not do much to dispel the false but common notion that most Americans are insular and lacking any real understanding of the world beyond their borders.

This stereotype, where true, is unfortunate enough to the extent that it applies to the general population, but even more concerning when it manifests itself in current and would-be future political office holders.

The Real Reason Behind Abstinence-Only Sex Education

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

abstinence only

 

Robert Reich has an interesting article from Slate.com, pondering the real motivation behind abstinence-only sex education in Texas, given the fact that it consistently and demonstrably leads to worse health outcomes (higher numbers of teen pregnancies and STDs, which one might think policymakers would wish to avoid).

Reich posits that it has a lot more to do with punishment – removing any protection from the potential consequences of their actions so that teen girls feel the pain and shame of their “immoral” ways – than it does with any sincere belief that abstinence-only is in any way an effective method of sex education:

It’s not that the Christian fundamentalists who dominate state politics in Texas wouldn’t prefer young people, at least the girls, to remain abstinent and then get married off at 19, passing them seamlessly from parental to spousal control. They’re always happy in those rare cases when that successfully happens. The question is what happens to the 95 per cent of us who are dissenters and go ahead and have sex without being married first. The main concern driving these policies is that sexually active, unmarried women will get away with their behavior without being punished. That’s why there’s obstacles such as parental notification between girls and access to contraception. The idea is that if a girl tries to escape her due punishment of unintended pregnancy, she should at least have to endure being grounded for her slatternly ways.

In examining the logic behind the policies, you have to conclude that proponents of abstinence-only sex education are either stupid (because they want teen pregnancy and STD rates go down, but are unable to see that the implementation of their policies are having the opposite effect), or mean (because they know full well that their policies are causing higher rates of pregnancies and STDs and are glad of it, because these young people need to be punished for their slutty ways):

If you start with the assumption that social conservatives agree that the problem is STDs and teen pregnancy and not sex itself, you’re inevitably going to conclude that their insistence on programs that seem to keep the STD and teen pregnancy rate high must mean they’re stupid. Incredibly stupid, on the can’t-tie-their-own-shoes level. And that seems a bit unfair. Fundamentalists can be annoying and pig-headed, but they’re not measurably stupider than the rest of us. Because of this, the only fair conclusion is poor sexual health outcomes is the point, because they believe that if kids won’t stop having sex, they should at least be doing the time for their “crimes.” If you start with the assumption that sex is sinful and it should have negative consequences for those who disobey your sky god’s orders, then really, the Texas anti-sex policies can be considered a smashing success.

It’s kind of like a parent letting their young child pick up a few bumps and scrapes while playing so that they learn to play carefully. Except that the “parent” in this case is the benificent state of Texas, the “child” is the millions of kids in the Texas school system, and the “bumps and scrapes” are highly infectious sexually transmitted diseases (caught because the adolescents were not taught about the dangers of unprotected sex), babies being born into unprepared, unwilling families (and in some cases suffering harsh childhoods as a result), or babies being aborted for the same reasons.

Great parenting job.

Live Television – How Not To Do It

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

There has been widespread public criticism – and not just from the usual suspects in the fusty, traditionalist right-wing media – about the quality of the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s diamond jubilee river flotilla, which aired on Sunday.

The Telegraph, twisting the knife, claims that the BBC’s reputation is “sunk” in the River Thames:

Like many viewers, I watched the BBC on Sunday with incredulity and mounting anger. It has become a truism that our national culture has been infantilised and made stupid. But if ever anything could be relied on to provide a temporary halt in that slide it would, surely, be the BBC’s coverage of the Diamond Jubilee. Much to the irritation of other channels, we turn to the national broadcaster at times of national togetherness. The BBC just gets it right.

Not any more. Sunday’s broadcast was not merely inane, it was insulting. The instruction had clearly gone out from on high that the audience would comprise imbeciles with a mental age of three and a 20-second attention span. And that any celebrity sighting, no matter how minor, would trump anything happening on the river.

So the flotilla – an event so awe-inspiring that it drew well over a million people, on a cold wet day, to stand 10-deep on the banks of the Thames to try to catch a sight – was treated merely as background for the witterings of the BBC’s most lightweight presenters and the D-list celebrities they had lined up to lurk anywhere but on the river.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9311490/The-BBCs-reputation-is-sunk-in-the-Thames.html

The Daily Mail sneers about the tasteless product placement during the broadcast:

The item that came in for most criticism featured Miss Cotton discussing a jubilee sick-bag with singer Paloma Faith.

After being asked by Miss Cotton whether she had had ‘a lovely jubilee weekend’, the singer seized the opportunity to plug her new album.

The pair then went on to discuss a number of bizarre items of jubilee memorabilia, including jelly moulds shaped like the Queen’s face; a high-visibility vest bearing the words ‘High Viz, Diamond Liz’; and, finally, a sick-bag bearing an image of the Queen.

Holding the bag, Miss Faith explained: ‘Then, if you’ve eaten too much, you can just vomit into a jubilee sick-bag.’

Miss Cotton replied: ‘Lovely, isn’t that just lovely? And you can choose your colour, red or blue, it’s up to you.’

The presenter, 30, last night congratulated herself and colleagues on ‘seven hours of spotless TV’.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2154222/Queens-Diamond-Jubilee-2012-BBC-sank-tide-wittering-inanity.html

Having personally sat through most of the Sunday coverage myself, I can only agree with these assessments.

Traditionally, Sky News has been (to my mind) the channel you turn to when there is breaking news and you want to see immediate, if somewhat shaky footage, shot from a helicopter and narrated by the reporter who is first on the scene, but is perhaps not fully briefed on the background of the story they are covering, while the BBC is the channel that you give an extra half hour for their reporter to turn up at the scene, but who then delivers a more nuanced and knowledgeable report when in situ.

This Jubilee weekend the situation was reversed, and I found myself giving up on the BBC’s lamentable, dumbed-down coverage in disgust, and switching over to Sky News so that I might actually learn something about what was taking place on the river, rather than have my intelligence insulted any further by the BBC’s callow, youthful and unknowledgeable presenters.

I suppose that my serious point would be that any large commercial broadcaster (Sky, ITV) can televise a large outdoor event and make it cheerful and perky. However, the BBC’s long history and deep institutional experience of broadcasting important national events – not to mention the fact that they are publicly funded by the television license fee – means that they are rightly held to a higher standard on such occasions. Certainly, in my view, the BBC should not merely replicate what is already readily available in the commercial media. But more importantly, like it or not, the BBC’s coverage of such events becomes the “coverage of record”. This is the footage that we will want to watch again when we ourselves are old, and the footage that future historians will study a century from now.

The BBC’s lamentable, frankly amateurish televised coverage of the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations has given those future historians an unintentionally revealing insight into what our pop culture, media and attention spans are apparently like in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But they will be sorely disappointed if they watch it with a view to learning anything at all about the British nation, British history or the monarchy – supposedly the reason for the broadcast in the first place.

Oops

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Barbara Walters’s credibility takes an unfortunate knock with the recent revelations that she tried to help further the journalistic career of one of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s close aides:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9312558/Barbara-Walters-apologises-over-links-to-Syrian-aide-of-Bashar-al-Assad.html

Says the Daily Telegraph:

Miss Jaafari, 22, was a close adviser to Mr Assad and was at his side as Syrian troops stepped up their campaign of killing and repression. She would speak to him several times a day, sometimes calling him “the Dude” in her adopted American accent, and was sometimes the only official in the room when he did interviews with Western journalists.

Miss Jaafari, whose father Bashar Jaafari has known Walters for around seven years, began dealing with the broadcaster late last year as ABC News lobbied for an interview with Mr Assad.

And worryingly:

Shortly afterwards, Walters emailed the young Syrian saying: “I wrote to Piers Morgan and his producer to say how terrific you are and attached your résumé.” She also asked whether Miss Jaafari was still planning on applying to Columbia University and offered to help.

A week later, Walters emailed Richard Wald, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism and the father of Jonathan Wald, Morgan’s executive producer.

Walters described Miss Jaafari as “brilliant, beautiful, [and] speaks five languages” and asked whether there was “anything you can do to help?” Prof Wald replied that he would get the admissions office to “give her special attention”.

But despite this lapse in judgement, let us not forget the many high points in the career of Barbara Walters – none so resplendent as the time when she interviewed former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and asked him what cabinet position he would be interested in holding in a future Republican administration:

 

“WHAT?”

Dancing With Yourself

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Tea Party Protest - Barack Obama

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It is hard to disagree with this assessment of recent GOP obstructionism from Jamelle Bouie at The American Prospect:

The crux of the matter:

If I sound frustrated—and I am—it’s because we’re in the middle of an absolutely ludicrous scenario. Under a Republican president, the United States endured eight years of disastrous economic stewardship—arguably the worst of the post-war era—that nearly led to a second Great Depression. In response, voters elected a Democratic president and gave him huge majorities in both chambers of Congress. Rather than work with the new president, Republicans ran to the right and promised to defeat this president by any means necessary. They abused institutional rules to block nominees, and imposed a de-facto super-majority requirement on all legislation. Republicans rejected stimulus, the automobile rescue, a climate bill built from their ideas, a health care bill built from their ideas, and a reform bill designed to keep the Great Recession from happening again.

This was an amazingly successful strategy. It destroyed Democratic standing with the public, energized the right-wing fringe, and led to a historic victory in the House of Representatives. Once in command of the House, Republicans pushed hugely draconian budgets, risked a government shutdown, and nearly caused a second economic collapse by threatening to default on the nation’s debt. This reckless behavior depressed the economy, prolonged the recovery, and destroyed trust in the nation’s political institutions. The Speaker of the House has even promised to do this again, if Democrats don’t bow to his demands for greater spending cuts.

The Republican party of today has drifted so far – not just to the right, but into the realm of crazy, where the eight years of disastrous Bush economic stewardship apparently never happened, and the economic malaise is entirely Obama’s fault – that it’s hard for me to see how I could ever bring myself to vote for them. I have joined firmly with those who are hoping for a complete electoral landslide in the upcoming presidential elections, to perhaps convince the GOP to tack back toward a reasonable, pragmatic conservatism.

Of course, this would have been easier if one of the crazies had managed to wrest the nomination away from Mitt Romney. As it is, we will probably have to wait until Romney’s likely defeat in 2012, and then a further tack to the right and an even bigger defeat in 2016 before we might finally have a viable choice between two parties again.