"You can't spend your way out of debt," a moderately intelligent person once told me. It's true; you cannot spend your way out of debt. Just as true and more important, you can't cut your way out of a recession. The bitter pill of austerity has turned an artificial debt crisis into a very real economic problem.
The factually mythical, yet widely accepted story of the financial crisis involves too much government spending starting with Obama's election and his subsequent $83,798,496 inaugural ball. I'm not even going there right now.
Naturally, according to this fictitious narrative, the solution to the problem is to stop spending money. Enter thousands of clowns in tri-corner hats, a group, despite their small size and complete lack of intelligence and cohesion was able to monopolize the national political conversation and the attention of policy makers.
Thankfully the Tea Party was not able to implement policy goals because they only controlled one branch of Congress, and let's not sugarcoat this, the Tea Party controls the House of Representatives. I don't care that there are only 70 or so of them, they have completely taken control of that chamber using the time-honored Republican tactic of yelling louder than the guy who is smarter than you. Unfortunately, the Tea Party has been able to impede progress and growth by making sure that any sensible policy actions do not get taken.
The problem with austerity is that it is a solution for cutting a deficit, but despite what you may have heard, the deficit isn't America's problem right now. It would be nice to have less of a deficit, but the current deficit isn't strangling our economy. High deficits lead to high interest rates for government borrowing because investors fear that a government may default. Despite the fact that the Tea Party actually tried to get us to default, interest rates on American bonds remain insanely low. Investors are not shying away from American government debt. The deficit is not our problem, unemployment and the recession are our problem. If we can put people back to work, we will automatically cut into that scary deficit by curtailing unemployment spending and taking in more in tax receipts.
So why, you may ask, why would we spit in the face of accepted economic theory and cut spending at a time when spending could do the most good? Here is what we know about austerity as a remedy for a broken economy - it doesn't work. Lucky for us, Eurozone countries were willing to act as our guinea pig. After watching Europe suffer through self-inflicted economic pain, low growth and riots, American politicians learned their lessons, recanted on the saving power of austerity and then...wait, that happened in the land of sense. In Washington, the Tea Party kept pushing for damaging cuts. And so while we haven't gotten complete austerity, we haven't gotten any kind of good investment in infrastructure or education. We haven't gotten higher tax rates on the wealthy or even the closing of tax loopholes. And because Republicans were unwilling to compromise when Obama infuriated Democrats by putting entitlement reform on the table, we haven't even gotten necessary entitlement reform. Instead, we hear the broken record of austerity warbling in the background. It's the itch we can't scratch, the fly we can't shoo away. No matter how bad an idea it is to be cutting at a time when we should be doing the exact opposite, there is going to be some elected fool out there telling us that if we could just NOT SPEND money to help hurricane victims then we'd be alright.
And now America stands on the brink of a double-dip recession. We may very well turn it around and come out of this - perhaps some investment in infrastructure...? However, we may very well slip back into the economic abyss from which we just started to emerge and we have only ourselves (read: the Tea Party) to blame. When you go to the polls next year, remember that when you elect the masochists, they have the opportunity to inflict pain on you as well.
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