NY Times columnist at UW
Port Townsend GetawayProfessor warns of Great Society’s downfall
Princeton Professor of Economics and International Affairs and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has an alarming view of the policies of the Bush Administration.
Speaking Tuesday Oct. 8 at an event sponsored by the World Affairs Council before a standing-room only crowd at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall, Krugman maintained that current government policy is rapidly giving the United States all the earmarks of a banana republic. The consequences of these policies, he said, are likely to be an economic crisis that Bush is hoping will arrive on someone else’s watch.
A self-described “economics ambulance chaser,” Krugman spent a number of years studying the dysfunctional political economies of the third world which had been involved in an number international financial crises in the 1990s.
In 1999, Krugman was hired by the New York Times to write about international economics. Now his columns deal mostly with domestic issues because as time progressed he began to perceive that the bad economic policies, corruption and crony capitalism with which he had become so familiar overseas were becoming increasingly prevalent in the United States.
For Krugman the Bush tax cut is a prime example. “The first thing you can say is that it was wildly irresponsible, third-world irresponsible, banana republic irresponsible,” he stated. “We started with a situation that was clearly very dire … We were looking at a deficit of several trillion dollars over the next decade and, then it would get worse. Any proposal for a long-term tax cut was very strange … It was cutting taxes in the face of already catastrophic-looking deficits. Worse than that, it was cutting taxes in the face of a prospective war.”
The tax cut was sold to the American people with a “remarkably dishonest sales job,” he commented. Advertised as an average $1,000 tax cut for 92 million taxpayers, it was actually a cut of between $0 and $100 for about one-half of the tax paying public.
This kind of salesmanship, claimed Krugman, has become “standard operating procedure” and has spread to many other Bush policies. Orwellian use of language was particularly strong, referring to the Healthy Forest Initiative, which allows companies — forest product companies — to do more logging, and the Clear Skies Initiative, which begins with the biggest weakening of the Clean Air Act since its inception.
While Krugman admitted that all previous administrations have had their share of dishonest propaganda, he believes that the Bush administration has raised the bar in this department. “The normal foibles of any government are so magnified now as to be something we haven’t seen before,” he said.
The ascendancy of policy over issues or problems is to blame for many of the contradictions of Bush policy. Problems for which he said previous administrations would seek solutions are now seen as opportunities to further radical policies. Thus the 2001 recession which would normally provoke increased federal spending and increased aid to state and local governments was used to justify a tax cut.
Krugman has come up with a theory to explain what he sees as the extreme policies now in force.
The Bush agenda, he has concluded, is being set by a radical coalition of the anti-tax right, the Christian Right, corporate interests and foreign unilateralists. In order to avoid his father’s fate, Bush has adopted a strategy of “no enemies on the right,” and so these radical groups are being granted their every wish. The fondest wish of these groups, for whom “The New Deal and the Great Society are terms of abuse,” said Krugman, is to dismantle the domestic programs of Roosevelt and Johnson (Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare) and the foreign policy begun under Truman (multilateralism). The strategy is to induce an economic squeeze where the American people will be forced to dismantle these programs. “Starve the Beast” is the preferred term in right-wing circles, said Krugman.
He further quoted prominent right-wing lobbyist Grover Norquist: “ I don’t want to eliminate government, I just want to shrink it down to a size that I can drown it in the bathtub.”
Already this crunch is in view as Krugman noted that the government is 25 percent short of the revenue it needs to maintain existing programs. In order to close this gap it will be necessary to have either “a 40- to 50-percent cut in programs like Social Security and Medicare, a rollback of the Bush tax cuts, or dishonor our debt,” he said.
Krugman sees Bush and his right-wing allies as a revolutionary power bent on smashing the structure of American society as it has existed for nearly the last 70 years.
To those critics who find his warnings too extreme and advise compromise with the right, he offers a quote from Henry Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation on the French Revolution:
“Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane … But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.”
And to those who find his criticisms uncivil, he said: “I think its important to be uncivil here, as one of my favorite columnists Eric Alterman … said that ‘to talk honestly about what’s happening right now requires bad manners,’ and so I’ve got bad manners.”