The fulfillment of the elites' fondest dream
by digby
Jumping off this must-read piece in the NYRB by Paul Krugman, Kevin Drum muses about why people believe that austerity is a moral necessity and concludes that average people probably just mistake the economics of their own lives with the economics of a government. (He doesn't mention that many of them can be forgiven for thinking this since politicians on both sides of the aisle constantly use the household metaphor to sell austerity measures.)
Anyway, his words about what the elites really think are what I wanted to highlight here:
I think for most of them, austerity is just a convenient facade. Their real motivation is simpler: they want to cut spending on the poor. Unfortunately, they've learned that this appeals only to voters who are already hardcore conservatives. To win over a broader audience, they need to appeal to the conventional view that a high debt level betrays a lack of national discipline and needs to be corrected at a national level. Like a household that spent too much redecorating its kitchen with a home equity loan, the country has spent too much and now needs to cut back. For most people, this argument is far more palatable than a simple appeal to cut spending.
So yes: a lot of people view the economy as a morality play. But among conservative elites, I suspect there's less of this than you might think. Rather, it's used primarily as a cynical way of getting the spending cuts they want without overtly bashing the poor.
I'm not sure this is entirely confined to conservative elites but perhaps the centrists who go along with the program simply don't care about the poor as opposed to consciously wanting to hurt them. In any case, what struck me about this observation is that the sequester is a perfectly realized policy under that definition. (Even better, it also includes hurting a whole bunch of federal workers, who they hate almost as much as poor people!) What could be better than that?
And the best part is that they got a bunch of Democrats (including some progressives) and a Democratic president to sign off on it. No wonder they've moved into full scandal mode. Their work is done.
Update: Also too: this
.