Austerity's Big Winners Prove To Be Wall Street And The Wealthy
Austerity advocates, like Rep. Paul Ryan,
argue their proposals will boost the economy.
WASHINGTON -- The poor and middle classes have shouldered by far the heaviest burdens of the global political obsession with austerity policies over the past three years. In the United States, budget cuts have forced states to reduce education, public transportation, affordable housing and other social services. In Europe, welfare cuts have driven some severely disabled individuals to fear for their lives.
But the austerity game also has winners. Cutting or eliminating government programs that benefit the less advantaged has long been an ideological goal of conservatives. Doing so also generates a tidy windfall for the corporate class, as government services are privatized and savings from austerity pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens.
U.S. financial interests that stand to gain from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security cutbacks "have been the core of the big con," the "propaganda," that those programs are in crisis and must be slashed, said James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas.
Advocates of austerity measures have sold their proposals as a means to improve the economy.
"It is an error to think that fiscal austerity is a threat to growth and job creation," declared European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet in July 2010.
"We're going to cut spending to get the debt down, help create jobs and prosperity, and reform government programs," vowed Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, in a February 2011 commentary for Real Clear Politics. Ryan would later declare that his budget plan, with far more aggressive austerity measures than those ultimately enacted by Congress -- including $6.2 trillion in spending cuts -- would have spurred $1.5 trillion in economic growth and created 2.5 million jobs.
As for the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, it is often described by Beltway insiders as a "centrist" proposal that could "bring the country together" and improve the economy. In fact, Simpson-Bowles is yet another austerity program that would cut Medicare and Social Security while securing tax breaks for corporations and the well-off, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of the bipartisan commission that worked on the plan, is a director at Morgan Stanley, the sixth-largest American bank and a financial institution for which the United States made huge commitments to help it weather the economic downturn. Morgan Stanley took $10 billion in bailout funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program and received more than $100 billion a day in cheap loans from the Federal Reserve at the height of the past financial crisis. For weeks, Morgan Stanley borrowed more money from the Fed than the company's stock market value.
That solicitude for the profits of big corporations shows up in Simpson-Bowles too. The plan offers multiple corporate tax reform proposals, but one, which calls for shifting to a so-called territorial tax system, would be especially advantageous to Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street banks. It would allow U.S. companies to permanently avoid paying U.S. taxes on overseas income, including money stashed in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands. According to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office, Morgan Stanley operates 273 sub-companies headquartered in such tax havens.
While Social Security advocates have attacked the plan, the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group for corporate CEOs, has praised Simpson-Bowles. So has Peter Peterson, who served as Richard Nixon's commerce secretary before founding Blackstone Group, a major private equity firm. Peterson has long advocated cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and he started a think tank devoted to federal debt reduction in 2008.
"I'm a great fan of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson," Peterson told Bloomberg in 2011. "I think they're American heroes."
As many economists predicted, however, the austerity policies implemented after the financial crisis have proved to be a losing proposition for the global economy. The strong economic growth that austerity advocates predicted has not materialized, with the United States showing only anemic improvements, and European countries sliding back into devastating recessions.
At the same time, corporate profits in the financial industry remain above even the levels reached at the height of the housing bubble, according to Commerce Department data. And elites on both sides of the Atlantic have secured generous tax breaks, made possible in part by cuts to social services.
In the United States, President George W. Bush's tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens were extended, while unemployment benefits and even food stamps have gone on the chopping block.
This tradeoff is even more apparent at the state level. In 2010, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) opted not to make the $3 billion annual contribution to the state workers' pension fund, instead securing $1 billion in tax cuts for the state's better-off residents. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has similarly proposed budgets that provide tax breaks for corporations and the rich while demanding pay and benefit cuts for middle-class state workers.
"Austerity policies are literally a redistribution from the bottom of the income spectrum to the top," said Dorian Warren, a professor of political science at Columbia University and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, an economic policy think tank. "In Wisconsin, both wealthy people and businesses got tax breaks, while middle-class and working-class employees of the state essentially got crushed."
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By Zach Carter
07/23/2012