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It is a trope of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life that govern-
ments faced with financial shortfalls look first to the services they pro-
vide their citizens when making cuts. Instances like these are innumer-
able and span every country in the world. When this happens, they
produce highly predictable, uniformly devastating effects on societies.
Call it the austerity effect: the inevitable public suffering that ensues
when nations and states cut public benefits in the name of economic
solvency and private industry. While austerity policies may not be iden-
tified by name, they underscore the most common tropes of contem-
porary politics: budget cuts (especially in welfare expenditures such as
public education, health care, housing, and unemployment benefits),
regressive taxation, deflation, privatization, wage repression, and em-
ployment deregulation. Taken together, this suite of policies entrenches
existing wealth and the primacy of the private sector, both of which tend
to be held up as economic keys that will guide nations to better days.
Americans have seen these policies repeated by governments at
every level. Attacks on unions have decimated workers' collective bar-
gaining rights; minimum wages languish at poverty levels; laws allow
employers to enforce "non-compete clauses" that bar certain workers
from changing jobs in pursuit of better pay; welfare has transformed
into "workfare," i.e., government assistance contingent upon low-wage
work. Most tellingly, the country's regressive tax policies enforce ineq-
uitable sharing of public expenses: a larger share of tax revenue drawn
from consumption taxes, which are shared across a society, paired
with exorbitant tax cuts across top income brackets-91 percent dur-
ing Eisenhower's presidency (1953-1961), 37 percent as of 2021-as well
as a reduction in capital gains taxes and corporate taxes. (The Trump
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