Well, this is lovely. The United States is now undergoing austerity.
To be sure, it’s a fairly mild form of austerity, i.e. over a ten-year period $44.8 trillion will be spent instead of $46 trillion. Most countries would love to be suffering this kind of austerity.
Here’s an unfair comparison, but I’ll make it anyway. The sequester amounts to a much smaller hit proportionately than the recent income tax increase, which the president argued was the wealthy’s “fair share” and which they could easily afford. It is becoming clear that the government will actually have to work hard at keeping any bad side effects (layoffs, transportation delays, safety problems) from looking like they are merely the results of bad management.
The fact that the dreaded sequester is small potatoes compared to the austerity Ireland has been undergoing for years now has not stopped the Irish (and British) press from echoing the U.S. president’s line that the spending pullback will be devastating. In fact, they have continued this line even while the president himself has drawn back and acknowledged that the sequester’s effects will be more subtle and drawn-out than he was previously suggesting.
BBC radio has been particularly interesting to listen to. When its business reporters are questioned by a show’s host, they tell a tale of impending doom for the U.S. economy because of the sequester. They are then sometimes followed by an actual economist who invariably explains that, no, it won’t really be that big a deal.
Make no mistake, a cut in spending—even a cut that is merely in the rate of spending, as this is—will have an effect on U.S. growth, as the president keeps telling us. The question is: is there a better alternative? Simply continuing to ignore the increasing imbalance between government revenues and expenditures might keep things feeling better in the short term, but it’s disastrous in the long run—and maybe even sooner than the long run.
What the U.S. is doing is a faint echo of what many European countries have been doing. When the numbers get too hard to ignore, politicians argue with each other whether to cut spending or increase taxes. Finally, in the apparent spirit of compromise, they often wind up doing both—which pretty cancels out the benefits of both. And that is what the U.S. has done. In January taxes were increased (although not by a huge amount) and now spending is being sort of reined in (by an even less degree).
But not only will it make little difference (beyond the benefit one or other of the political parties can accrue by successfully making the blame stick to the other) but it distracts from the real problems, which are entitlements that grow faster than revenues can keep up with and a tax system that has grown so complicated that it is worse than unfair; it is inefficient.
The good news is that there are people in both parties who see the problems for what they are and would like to work to solve them. The bad news is that the president, who does not have to face reelection, has shown no real interest in entitlement reform or tax reform. He gives lip service to both, but in more than four years has made no move to push either.
Even legendary Washington reporter Bob Woodward, who literally wrote the book on how the sequester came about, has been causing waves by speaking the obvious truth. The president has not negotiated with Republicans in good faith. He keeps moving the goal posts, and in doing so accrues political victories for himself.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Accounting for Tastes
It has been interesting to watch the reaction in Ireland to the discovery that there has been horse meat mixed into some burger patties sold here.
Of course, there is always cause for concern when something shows up in your food which wasn’t meant to be there. The idea that the authorities cannot tell you for sure what is in your food and where it came from is, to say the least, worrisome. On the other hand, there is something reassuring that authorities did, in routine inspections, manage to pick up on what seem to be traces of non-beef DNA.
But the concern and outrage went beyond quality control procedures. As I heard one fellow on the radio argue it, many people consider it immoral to eat a horse. For a lot of people, it is as distasteful as eating a dog or a cat is for most westerners.
The contamination also extends to the United Kingdom, and I can truly understand the upset over there. The English nearly worship their horses, as you can tell from watching equestrian events at the Olympics and movies set in the English countryside.
Personally, in the case of the Irish, I suspect that it also has to do with the idea that, when horses wind up on the dinner table, there are fewer of them around to wager on.
I confess to being just a bit amused by the brouhaha. It brings back memories of the year I spent in Bordeaux as a student. In the student cafeteria, we got served horse meat about once a week. It wasn’t half bad and was prepared not unlike a burger patty. In our self-conscious student Franglais, we Americans dubbed them cheval burgers.
I ate a lot of things in France that I hadn’t been accustomed to previously. I never warmed up much to cow brains, tripe or blood sausage. I used to envy the Moslem students on the days they served us boudin, as the sausage was called. To accommodate their religious beliefs, they were served ravioli instead. I asked to get the same thing, but the imperious food staff wouldn’t serve anyone ravioli if they couldn’t make a credible case that they were Moslem or Jewish.
One thing that most of the other Americans couldn’t stomach was cow’s tongue. For some reason, the very idea of it put them off. Maybe it was the sight of the taste buds on top. Me, I had no problem with it because, by that point in my life, tongue was one of my favorite things. It was a regular appetizer at the Basque restaurants I used to frequent in East Bakersfield with my family and with my best friend Eric.
The Basque tongue I had was always sliced very thin and pickled. The tongue I had in Bordeaux was cut thicker and had a completely different, thicker kind of sauce over it. It was different than I was expecting, and that disappointed me. But I happily ate all of it, which disgusted the other Americans.
Basque food was one of the two types of cuisine I missed the most during that year abroad. The other was Mexican. I could find Basque restaurants in Bordeaux, but the food was nothing like the food I had had in Bakersfield. Mexican food, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. During the entire year, I found only two self-described Mexican restaurants in Europe. One was in Madrid, and all I remember about it was the food was extremely dark and hot. The other restaurant was in London, and it was actually a bit better than the Madrid one, but not by much.
In the 1990s, when I went back to Paris after many years, I was amused to find there were actually Mexican-theme chain restaurants. The best Mexican restaurant I have found in France to date is in Cannes.
Mexican food was not the only thing I was missing during my student year in France that I found in Madrid. Following rumors, some American friends and I sought out a bar that had the feel of a speakeasy. It had something we had not been able to find anywhere else in France or Spain: root beer. The rumors said that it was illegal in Europe and had to be smuggled in. I doubt if that was true, but it made the root beer taste even better.
That’s a memory that came back to me last year when someone turned me on to the new “American shop” in Galway. Mainly a sweet shop, it has a section catering to homesick Yanks. There on the shelf I found—next to the Froot Loops, Hershey chocolate syrup, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Libby pumpkin pie filling—was good old A&W Root Beer.
I had forgotten I was even missing it.
Of course, there is always cause for concern when something shows up in your food which wasn’t meant to be there. The idea that the authorities cannot tell you for sure what is in your food and where it came from is, to say the least, worrisome. On the other hand, there is something reassuring that authorities did, in routine inspections, manage to pick up on what seem to be traces of non-beef DNA.
But the concern and outrage went beyond quality control procedures. As I heard one fellow on the radio argue it, many people consider it immoral to eat a horse. For a lot of people, it is as distasteful as eating a dog or a cat is for most westerners.
The contamination also extends to the United Kingdom, and I can truly understand the upset over there. The English nearly worship their horses, as you can tell from watching equestrian events at the Olympics and movies set in the English countryside.
Personally, in the case of the Irish, I suspect that it also has to do with the idea that, when horses wind up on the dinner table, there are fewer of them around to wager on.
I confess to being just a bit amused by the brouhaha. It brings back memories of the year I spent in Bordeaux as a student. In the student cafeteria, we got served horse meat about once a week. It wasn’t half bad and was prepared not unlike a burger patty. In our self-conscious student Franglais, we Americans dubbed them cheval burgers.
I ate a lot of things in France that I hadn’t been accustomed to previously. I never warmed up much to cow brains, tripe or blood sausage. I used to envy the Moslem students on the days they served us boudin, as the sausage was called. To accommodate their religious beliefs, they were served ravioli instead. I asked to get the same thing, but the imperious food staff wouldn’t serve anyone ravioli if they couldn’t make a credible case that they were Moslem or Jewish.
One thing that most of the other Americans couldn’t stomach was cow’s tongue. For some reason, the very idea of it put them off. Maybe it was the sight of the taste buds on top. Me, I had no problem with it because, by that point in my life, tongue was one of my favorite things. It was a regular appetizer at the Basque restaurants I used to frequent in East Bakersfield with my family and with my best friend Eric.
The Basque tongue I had was always sliced very thin and pickled. The tongue I had in Bordeaux was cut thicker and had a completely different, thicker kind of sauce over it. It was different than I was expecting, and that disappointed me. But I happily ate all of it, which disgusted the other Americans.
Basque food was one of the two types of cuisine I missed the most during that year abroad. The other was Mexican. I could find Basque restaurants in Bordeaux, but the food was nothing like the food I had had in Bakersfield. Mexican food, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. During the entire year, I found only two self-described Mexican restaurants in Europe. One was in Madrid, and all I remember about it was the food was extremely dark and hot. The other restaurant was in London, and it was actually a bit better than the Madrid one, but not by much.
In the 1990s, when I went back to Paris after many years, I was amused to find there were actually Mexican-theme chain restaurants. The best Mexican restaurant I have found in France to date is in Cannes.
Mexican food was not the only thing I was missing during my student year in France that I found in Madrid. Following rumors, some American friends and I sought out a bar that had the feel of a speakeasy. It had something we had not been able to find anywhere else in France or Spain: root beer. The rumors said that it was illegal in Europe and had to be smuggled in. I doubt if that was true, but it made the root beer taste even better.
That’s a memory that came back to me last year when someone turned me on to the new “American shop” in Galway. Mainly a sweet shop, it has a section catering to homesick Yanks. There on the shelf I found—next to the Froot Loops, Hershey chocolate syrup, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Libby pumpkin pie filling—was good old A&W Root Beer.
I had forgotten I was even missing it.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
A Tale of Two Budgets
There was a time in my life when I thought the United States would be better off with a parliamentary system of government—instead of the presidential system that it has had for 223 years.
I expect that most people who spend much time thinking about politics have played the game that I have. It goes like this: if I were in charge of the world, how would I rewrite my country’s constitution so that things would work better? Right now a lot of people must be playing this game, as they watch the dysfunctional Kabuki theater that is the current congressional lame duck session.
If you are like me, you will be very happy when we get to the point where we don’t hear the phrase fiscal cliff every time a newscast comes on. The economist and commentator Irwin Stelzer had a better term yesterday evening on BCC radio. He said, aptly, that a better metaphor would be a fiscal bungee jump.
After spending a year in Europe as a student, I became enamored of the parliamentary system. Here are some of that system’s attractive qualities. Election campaigns are mercifully brief—mainly because usually no one knows for sure when the next parliamentary election will be until a few weeks before. You do not have divided government, as the U.S. currently has with voters electing one party to control the House Representatives and another to control the White House. If a government becomes extremely unpopular, it can be brought down and replaced almost immediately. And, perhaps most attractively, it is easier to find a political party that is in line with your own values because there are more of them.
The fact is, when we have only two parties (for all practical purposes) to choose between, most of us will find ourselves voting for the lesser of two evils because neither party will correspond exactly to every nuance of opinion that we hold on the wide array of social, economic and legal issues of the day. It’s no wonder that U.S. presidential elections tend to devolve into highly researched marketing campaigns that attempt to push as many hot buttons for the highest number of targeted voters as possible.
Eventually, however, I came to the conclusion that the United States is simply too large a country—and too complex, given its fifty state governments—for a parliamentary system to be able to work effectively. The current system may have lots of problems, but it’s hard to think of a better one.
The difference between the American and European political systems can be seen clearly in the way the U.S. and Ireland (where I currently live) are going about their budgets. While Barack Obama and John Boehner butt heads and hope that they can make the other appear to be responsible for the looming failure to ward off across-the-board tax increases and budget cuts, Ireland’s Taoiseach Enda Kenny simply presented a budget that was pre-ordained to be passed by Dáil Éireann, the parliament. Kenny only had to negotiate with members of his own party, Fine Gael, and his coalition partner, the Labour Party.
In the end, though, the practical result in Ireland is not altogether dissimilar from the U.S. going over the fiscal cliff. The Irish are looking forward to significant tax increases and budget cuts. This isn’t exactly because Fine Gael and Labour thought this would be a fine and good way to manage things. They had no choice because they were working under constraints imposed by the so-called troika (the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank), which had to bail Ireland out of bankruptcy.
At the end of the day, does it really matter what political system a country has, as long as it’s essentially democratic in nature? Won’t a society get around to doing what it needs to do under whatever system it happens to have?
The answer is probably, yes—although some systems seem more conducive to decisive action than others. But then decisive action is always easier when there is a predominant political consensus. And that is America’s problem. The country is very divided about what kind of nation it wants to be. In fact, when it comes to consensus, America has the same problem as Europe. It likes the idea of ever increasing government financial obligations to its citizens—but no one (except maybe Warren Buffett, President Obama and a few others) wants to pay for it with their own money.
Here’s a dirty little secret. The reason some billionaires, like Buffett, seem happy enough to see their tax rates go up is that they know that, despite politicians’ claims and promises to the contrary, there will always be loopholes to shelter their money—as long as they contribute wisely during election season.
I expect that most people who spend much time thinking about politics have played the game that I have. It goes like this: if I were in charge of the world, how would I rewrite my country’s constitution so that things would work better? Right now a lot of people must be playing this game, as they watch the dysfunctional Kabuki theater that is the current congressional lame duck session.
If you are like me, you will be very happy when we get to the point where we don’t hear the phrase fiscal cliff every time a newscast comes on. The economist and commentator Irwin Stelzer had a better term yesterday evening on BCC radio. He said, aptly, that a better metaphor would be a fiscal bungee jump.
After spending a year in Europe as a student, I became enamored of the parliamentary system. Here are some of that system’s attractive qualities. Election campaigns are mercifully brief—mainly because usually no one knows for sure when the next parliamentary election will be until a few weeks before. You do not have divided government, as the U.S. currently has with voters electing one party to control the House Representatives and another to control the White House. If a government becomes extremely unpopular, it can be brought down and replaced almost immediately. And, perhaps most attractively, it is easier to find a political party that is in line with your own values because there are more of them.
The fact is, when we have only two parties (for all practical purposes) to choose between, most of us will find ourselves voting for the lesser of two evils because neither party will correspond exactly to every nuance of opinion that we hold on the wide array of social, economic and legal issues of the day. It’s no wonder that U.S. presidential elections tend to devolve into highly researched marketing campaigns that attempt to push as many hot buttons for the highest number of targeted voters as possible.
Eventually, however, I came to the conclusion that the United States is simply too large a country—and too complex, given its fifty state governments—for a parliamentary system to be able to work effectively. The current system may have lots of problems, but it’s hard to think of a better one.
The difference between the American and European political systems can be seen clearly in the way the U.S. and Ireland (where I currently live) are going about their budgets. While Barack Obama and John Boehner butt heads and hope that they can make the other appear to be responsible for the looming failure to ward off across-the-board tax increases and budget cuts, Ireland’s Taoiseach Enda Kenny simply presented a budget that was pre-ordained to be passed by Dáil Éireann, the parliament. Kenny only had to negotiate with members of his own party, Fine Gael, and his coalition partner, the Labour Party.
In the end, though, the practical result in Ireland is not altogether dissimilar from the U.S. going over the fiscal cliff. The Irish are looking forward to significant tax increases and budget cuts. This isn’t exactly because Fine Gael and Labour thought this would be a fine and good way to manage things. They had no choice because they were working under constraints imposed by the so-called troika (the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank), which had to bail Ireland out of bankruptcy.
At the end of the day, does it really matter what political system a country has, as long as it’s essentially democratic in nature? Won’t a society get around to doing what it needs to do under whatever system it happens to have?
The answer is probably, yes—although some systems seem more conducive to decisive action than others. But then decisive action is always easier when there is a predominant political consensus. And that is America’s problem. The country is very divided about what kind of nation it wants to be. In fact, when it comes to consensus, America has the same problem as Europe. It likes the idea of ever increasing government financial obligations to its citizens—but no one (except maybe Warren Buffett, President Obama and a few others) wants to pay for it with their own money.
Here’s a dirty little secret. The reason some billionaires, like Buffett, seem happy enough to see their tax rates go up is that they know that, despite politicians’ claims and promises to the contrary, there will always be loopholes to shelter their money—as long as they contribute wisely during election season.
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