Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
12 March 13
epublicans
lost the election but they still shape what's debated in Washington -
the federal budget deficit and so-called "fiscal responsibility."
The White House's and the Democrat's continuing
failure to reshape that debate has led directly and logically to Paul
Ryan's budget plan this week, which is a more regressive version of the
same plan American voters resoundingly rejected last November.
Sadly, the President is playing into the GOP's hands with a new round of negotiations over a "grand bargain."
Despite February's encouraging job numbers, the major
challenge is still jobs, wages, growth, and widening inequality - not
deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility.
We'd need numbers like February's every month for the
next four years to get anywhere close to the level of unemployment we
had before the Great Recession. But we won't get there because of the
austerity policies the nation has embarked on, and the continuing
erosion of the middle class.
Austerity economics - of which Ryan's upcoming budget
is the most extreme version - is a cruel hoax. Cruel because it hurts
most those who are already hurting; a hoax because it doesn't work.
The entire framework is based on the false analogy that the federal budget is akin to a family's budget.
Families do have to balance their budgets. But that's
precisely why the federal government has to be the spender of last
resort when consumer spending falls short of boosting the economy toward
full employment.
And as long as income and wealth continue to
concentrate at the very top, the broad middle class and those aspiring
to join it won't have the purchasing power to boost the economy.
So why even try for a "grand bargain" that won't deal
with these fundamentals but only further legitimize the GOP mythology
and further mislead the public about what's really at stake?
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