Politicians In Europe Try To Find The Details Of Austerity

Somewhere among all of those hundreds of billions of dollars in budgets from Greece, Ireland, the US, Spain, and Portugal, wasteful spending is hiding. Or, perhaps it is money that is “essential” to the process of governing but has become less so in an age of prosperity.

The FT reports that in the UK “A £6bn contract for civil search-and-rescue missions, a £1bn job creation scheme and a £7.5bn order for new inter-city trains are hanging in the balance as ministers scour departments for savings from recently awarded pilots and government contracts.”The notion is that there is a great deal of money to be saved in the budgets of European nations that are stretched to close deficits. That same sort of money is lurking in the US budget. President Obama has appointed an 18- person commission to look for spending that can be cut. It is what is known in Washington as a “blue ribbon” panel, headed by former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson. “Blue ribbon” generally translates into ineffectual. That remains to be seen, but any analysis the panel may bring to the president is no better than his ability to get Congress to support cuts. Cuts in essential services are rarely popular with voters. And, although Mr. Obama says that “everything is on the table”, it depends on whether that table sits on the floor of the Senate and the House.

The trouble that the US would face if it were to make deep cuts in federal costs or increases in taxes are the same problems that the European nations face. The riots that have sprung up in several nations are just the tip of an iceberg. No cuts really work without popular support. Every government in the world knows that its citizens can hide money and business transactions. Strikers can shut essential services.

In most countries, when austerity measures are announced, the head of state and the chief of the opposition party stand arm-in-arm and profess support for austerity. When the infighting starts about whose ox will be gored, that cooperation will end quickly. Mr. Obama will find that he is up against the same problem.

The reason the capital markets are so willing to short the political will of most of the troubled European countries and will eventually short similar efforts in the UK and US when they come, and they will, is that traders are willing to admit freely what politicians are not. People will only change their habits when their futures are being crushed by the events around them, much as they were when the credit crisis hit and millions of people were losing jobs in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Otherwise, they are willing to blindly believe that the world of deficits will never touch them, and that means that it will eventually bring the temple down around their ears.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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