Another rant about fiscal conservatism

[sabotabby]

This link, brought to my attention via ed_rex, is worth a read. It's a comparison between the spending patterns of ostensibly "conservative" versus "liberal"* governments that gives lie to the popular conception of thrifty conservatives and tax-and-spend liberals.

Check out those bar graphs being essentially the same. Now, granted, there is not much difference between the Liberal Party and the CCRAP Party. We're not talking about a vast, insurmountable canyon between left and right. Stephen Harper consumes more kittens and Justin Trudeau had better hair until he cut it off, but those are social differences, not economic ones. Their economic policy was more or less the same last time I checked. If your average Canadian understood the slightest thing about economics** we could stay warm during polar vortex season with the sheer heat of all the collective anger that it would generate. But. Math is hard, let's go shopping, only we can't go shopping because the minimum wage hasn't kept up with the cost of living and the only jobs available now are minimum wage retail and food service that you were told you need to go to university if you didn't want to do all your life, and if you want them, prepare to stand in line to apply along with everyone else with a Masters degree.

Anyway.

So-called moderate Canadians love to think of themselves as socially liberal and fiscally conservative, with absolutely no clue as to why they want to be fiscally conservative. (Hint: It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding about economics wherein the model of a private family that must budget and avoid falling into debt is expanded to somehow apply to a city, or a province, or a country, or even an entire planet. But it does not actually work that way. While no one likes the idea of wasting money, thriftiness is not necessarily a virtue when one is trying to, say, maintain highway infrastructure.)

The great lie at the heart of the austerity agenda is that it works. Tighten your belt, don't buy that big screen TV, and later on you can afford to buy a nice car. It might be tolerable to cause suffering, to siphon wealth from the poorest people to the richest, if in the end everyone benefited. (Just kidding. It wouldn't. Bear with me for a second, though.) If slashing environmental regulations and corporate tax actually created jobs, though, would we not have full employment by now? Because governments have been pursuing these policies for practically my entire lifetime, and yet the unemployment rate keeps increasing. We've "recovered" from the Great Recession but the vast majority of people I know—who are among the most privileged people—are still economically precarious. And, surprise surprise, after all that, all of the wealth has still ended up at the top. It's like someone planned it this way.

Which is basically why I want to scream every time someone promotes the myth of fiscal conservatism, because it's just not true. It's just that conservative governments waste money on different things, things that don't actually benefit anyone other than their cronies. Fiscal conservatives like to think of themselves as high-minded, tough but fair, without any sort of understanding or comprehension of the violence brought about by a cut-cut-cut mentality (or the fact that, in the end, absolutely no money is saved, and wealth is just transferred along to the elites).

One of my FB friends loves mayoral candidate John Tory. Like, loves him. Makes borderline homoerotic posts about him every day. It's weird. I see nothing in John Tory to inspire any sort of passion—he's run-of-the-mill fiscal conservative who comes off as more sensible than Ford, but that doesn't say much. You can at least get passionate about Ford, even if, as in my case, it's passionate hatred. Tory's milquetoast, but the harm that such a man can do when given power, when it comes to vital social services relied upon by the most vulnerable populations, is immeasurable. And yet he appeals to moderates because moderates have never thought about why they're moderates.

When you take the food out of the mouths of poor people, you create a cycle of poverty that, as class stratification increases, becomes impossible to escape. When you cut transit, you kill cities. When you drain the lifeblood from schools and libraries, you condemn generations to ignorance. When you gut environmental, labour, and safety regulation, you trash the earth and destroy lives. This is not a moderate position, nor is it "tough but fair." It's extremist. Brutal. Today, I woke up to a story about a fire in a seniors' home in Quebec that killed 32 people. There were no sprinklers in the home, but it still passed provincial safety inspections. They were comparing this tragedy to the train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, which killed 47 people and is still under investigation. Again, cutbacks and lax regulation may have been a factor. There is actually a reason we pay taxes and have governments.

And that is the triumph of conservatism, as it's convinced most of the world (at least the bit that votes) that this constant squeeze, for no payoff for you or anyone you know, is normal. You shouldn't think about it. Be grateful if you save a few pennies in taxes, even as you earn less and spend more for everything else. There Is No Alternative.

* Scare quotes because the economic policies of every mainstream party in North America (I can't speak for other regions) is what we might have, in previous generations, considered conservative. Even the NDP's leadership, if not its rank-and-file, has swallowed the Washington Consensus Kool-Aid with the enthusiasm of a porn star in a bukkake video, despite its myriad observable failures.

** Disclaimer: Beyond having a dilettante's interest in these matters and having slogged through Volume 1 of Das Kapital, I have no background in economics.

Comments

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

The 1990s saw 'liberal' governments in both the US and Canada that had totally bought the conservative agenda of the 80s. But the picture for these governments isn't quite as bad as it looks. The 90s, after the first couple of years, was a period of quite strong growth, so public spending could potentially go up but fall as a share of GDP. Then as unemployment was falling, the amount being paid out in unemployment benefit and some other poverty-related benefits would have been falling too. Finally, you can put 0.8 percentage points of the fall in Canada and 1.8 percentage points in the US down to the fall in military spending as a share of GDP. That's actually at least half the fall under Clinton. But the ideological Neo-liberalism is still a major factor of course. Then with the Bush government, the increase in the share up to 2008 is entirely accounted for by military spending, and the huge increase afterwards is, first, the fall in GDP (which increases the share), and then the Obama stimulus (they've somehow put 2009 under Bush).

None of this detracts from the main point which is that fiscal conservatism sucks, and it is unbelievably stupid how many people have bought into it. Problem is, Keynesianism is counter-intuitive, so when you've got so much propaganda behind the austerity argument, it's very hard to get its fallacies through to people.

I think the point you make, about how Tories still want to spend your money, just on their cronies and pet interests, is one of the ways to go. Like wars and tax cuts for the rich (which is not spending as such, but still is a revenue losing move), and so on.

Then again, the austerity vs Keynesianism argument and the size of government argument are actually in theory two separate ones; you could have austerity purely by raising taxes, or Keynesian stimulus (though a less effective one) through cutting them. But in practice of course, when they talk about austerity it's almost always about cutting spending. And raising taxes in general has become almost a total taboo. (Though mild increases on the rich does seem to have come back into the debate a bit at least in some parts, including the UK).

[sabotabby]

I think the point you make, about how Tories still want to spend your money, just on their cronies and pet interests, is one of the ways to go. Like wars and tax cuts for the rich (which is not spending as such, but still is a revenue losing move), and so on.

But then you sound like a socialist. :)

There's definitely a broadening of debate, but, at least here, not by people who have any hope of being listened to.