The Age of Austerity: Obama asks America to put its house in order

 Daily Kos pretty much sums up the mood of liberals and progressives about the extent to which Obama has adopted not only the language, but also the vision of Herbert Hoover and other opponents of the New Deal.

"In the past week, we witnessed the truly astonishing spectacle of a wide array of Democratic Congressional leaders feeling it necessary to stand up to a Democratic President in order to defend the programs and values that have defined the Democratic Party since the Great Depression. Just think about that. And now some consider it a victory that there probably won't be any immediate cuts to Social Security, even though there will be a trillion or more in overall budget cuts, without any major increases in revenue. And cutting Social Security is now safe to discuss on both sides of the aisle. To use digby's own comparison, only Nixon could go to China; and while Reagan and the Bushes did not even seriously try, a Democratic president may be opening the door to the dismantling of the New Deal."

Inside the debt reduction talks

 

There seem to be few if any photos from the inner chambers where deliberations about the looming calamity of an Obama/Congress debt "deal" are taking place.

To fill the gap, this painting, Francisco Goya's "Duelo a garrotazos" (duel with cudgels), 1819-1823, with two young men, legs stuck in the mud, perpetually flailing away at each other, captures the spirit of what passes for "serious" economic and policy thinking in Washington, D.C. these days.  It's one of the works in Goya's series of "Black Paintings" produced after he'd withdrawn from his career as artist for the Spanish crown.

I wonder, which of today's artists and works adequately convey the deranged, rudderless trajectories of American social, economic and political life as the new century unfolds?  One nominee would certainly be David Simon and his masterful series of Goyaesque video black paintings, "The Wire."

When the rich stop paying their share -- empires collapse

Writing in the Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris imagines that America's plutocrats may well be repeating a familiar historical pattern: "the willingness of the rich to defend their wealth from taxation to the point of national ruin". 

"The Han dynasty in China fell in the third century AD after aristocratic families with government connections became increasingly able to shield their ever-larger land holdings from taxation, which helped precipitate the bloody Yellow Turban peasant revolt. Nearly a millennium and a half later, the great Ming dynasty went into protracted decline in part for similar reasons: unable or unwilling to raise taxes on the landed gentry, the government couldn’t pay its soldiers and was overrun by Manchu invaders. In the fifteenth century, the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus persuaded his reluctant nobles to accept higher taxes, with which he built a professional military that beat back the invading Ottomans. But after his death the resentful barons placed a weak foreign prince on the throne and got their taxes cut 70 to 80 percent. When their undisciplined army lost to Suleiman the Magnificent, Hungary lost its independence.
Similarly, the cash-strapped sixteenth-century Spanish monarchy sold municipal and state offices off to wealthy elites rather than raise their taxes—giving them the right to collect public revenues. The elites, in turn, raised taxes on commerce, immiserating peasants and artisans and putting Spain on a path of long-term economic decline. This same practice of exempting the wealthy from taxation and selling them government offices while transferring the tax burden onto the poor reached its apogee in ancien regime France and ended with the guillotine."

Glastris' source for these examples is Francis Fukuyama's book The Origins of Political Order.
So, folks, keep your popcorn ready and TV set on for the next several weeks; you may be able to watch our national march of folly carry us right over the cliff, the rich leading the parade!