STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 10 May 2012

[Demeter]

9. European People Have Rejected Austerity Madness: Will the U.S. Get the Message? By Marshall Auerback

http://www.alternet.org/story/155302/european_people_have_rejected_austerity_madness%3A_will_the_u.s._get_the_message?page=entire

So the voters of Europe have spoken, and surprise, surprise: they are not too keen on fiscal austerity. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, became the first incumbent to lose since 1981. In Greece, the mainstream parties that have been happily participating in the country's national suicide were soundly rejected by the electorate (who finally had a say on the country’s economic course after being the unwilling recipients of a European Union/International Monetary Fund-sponsored financial coup d’etat over the last several months). Governments in Europe have been caught up in the fiscal austerity narrative that the neo-liberals imposed on failing economies everywhere. They believe that if they demonstrate misguided “fiscal responsibility” through the maniacal pursuit of a budget surplus, the electorate will reward them for being good managers. However, as the Greek and French elections vividly demonstrate, the electorate is more concerned about real income growth and employment opportunities and they are clear that the current strategy is undermining both.

What Europe’s technocratic elites fail to grasp is that it is folly to pursue a budget surplus at a time when the economy is slowing. In a weak economy, what economists call "automatic stabilizers" kick in (payments like unemployment benefits) to keep things from going into freefall. When the government has to make those kinds of emergency expenditures, and people are out of work, tax revenue plunges. So budget deficits are to be expected, and trying to pursue cuts in the face of that reality is very irresponsible fiscal management. One would think that American politicians would take note. And yet precisely the opposite lessons are being drawn in the US.

In the US, there has been much discussion recently of what's known as the “fiscal cliff.” That's what we may be headed over on the first day of 2013, when the Bush-era tax cuts revert back to previous levels, and the more than $1 trillion in arbitrary budget cuts Congress approved last year are scheduled to begin. Some would call the policies that have produced this scenario “responsible fiscal management.” I would argue that it would represent a self-inflicted wound of historic proportions. Even the International Monetary Fund has expressed such grave concerns that lawmakers will drive over the cliff that it ranks the possibility as a threat equal to that posed by the European debt crisis.

In the US, it might be sensible to get some kind of balance between high income earners and the 99 percent. But it isn’t a matter of taxing the rich more to get the funds to reduce the deficit. Deficit reduction should not be an object of policy, period. The urgent problem is that we need to support the demand for goods and services in our economy. If we pursue budget cuts that take money out of the pockets of consumers, then people stop spending, businesses stop hiring, and we get into the death spiral that has played out so tragically in European countries. The macroeconomic urgency at present is to escape the austerity mindset and get growth going. In fact, it is only because of those “horrible” budget deficits which policy-makers continue to describe as “unsustainable” that the US continues to grow at all (in stark contrast to the Eurozone). Policy abominations such as those pushed by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who call for so-called "entitlement reform," are exactly the opposite of what is required for a healthy economy. Reaching into the pockets of hard-working people does not drive economic growth -- and at some point, when they are squeezed beyond endurance, the people will push back.

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Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.