[Vision2020] We Don’t Need No Education

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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June 14, 2012
We Don’t Need No Education By PAUL KRUGMAN

Hope springs eternal. For a few hours I was ready to applaud Mitt Romney
for speaking honestly about what his calls for smaller government actually
mean.

Never mind. Soon the candidate was being his normal self, denying having
said what he said and serving up a bunch of self-contradictory excuses. But
let’s talk about his accidental truth-telling, and what it reveals.

In the remarks Mr. Romney later tried to deny, he derided President Obama:
“He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers.” Then he
declared, “It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American
people.”

You can see why I was ready to give points for honesty. For once, he
actually admitted what he and his allies mean when they talk about
shrinking government. Conservatives love to pretend that there are vast
armies of government bureaucrats doing who knows what; in reality, a
majority of government workers are employed providing either education
(teachers) or public protection (police officers and firefighters).

So would getting rid of teachers, police officers, and firefighters help
the American people? Well, some Republicans would prefer to see Americans
get less education; remember Rick Santorum’s description of colleges as
“indoctrination mills”? Still, neither less education nor worse protection
are issues the G.O.P. wants to run on.

But the more relevant question for the moment is whether the public job
cuts Mr. Romney applauds are good or bad for the economy. And we now have a
lot of evidence bearing on that question.

First of all, there’s our own experience. Conservatives would have you
believe that our disappointing economic performance has somehow been caused
by excessive government spending, which crowds out private job creation.
But the reality is that private-sector job growth has more or less matched
the recoveries from the last two recessions; the big difference this time
is an unprecedented fall in public employment, which is now about 1.4
million jobs less than it would be if it had grown as fast as it did under
President George W. Bush.

And, if we had those extra jobs, the unemployment rate would be much lower
than it is — something like 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent. It sure
looks as if cutting government when the economy is deeply depressed hurts
rather than helps the American people.

The really decisive evidence on government cuts, however, comes from
Europe. Consider the case of Ireland, which has reduced public employment
by 28,000 since 2008 — the equivalent, as a share of population, of laying
off 1.9 million workers here. These cuts were hailed by conservatives, who
predicted great results. “The Irish economy is showing encouraging signs of
recovery,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute in June 2010.

But recovery never came; Irish unemployment is currently more than 14
percent. Ireland’s experience shows that austerity in the face of a
depressed economy is a terrible mistake to be avoided if possible.

And the point is that in America it is possible. You can argue that
countries like Ireland had and have very limited policy choices. But
America — which unlike Europe has a federal government — has an easy way to
reverse the job cuts that are killing the recovery: have the feds, who can
borrow at historically low rates, provide aid that helps state and local
governments weather the hard times. That, in essence, is what the president
was proposing and Mr. Romney was deriding.

So the former governor of Massachusetts was telling the truth the first
time: by opposing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, he is, in
effect, calling for more layoffs of teachers, policemen and firemen.

Actually, it’s kind of ironic. While Republicans love to engage in
Europe-bashing, they’re actually the ones who want us to emulate
European-style austerity and experience a European-style depression.

And that’s not just an inference. Last week R. Glenn Hubbard of Columbia
University, a top Romney adviser, published an article in a German
newspaper urging the Germans to ignore advice from Mr. Obama and continue
pushing their hard-line policies. In so doing, Mr. Hubbard was deliberately
undercutting a sitting president’s foreign policy. More important, however,
he was throwing his support behind a policy that is collapsing as you read
this.

In fact, almost everyone following the situation now realizes that
Germany’s austerity obsession has brought Europe to the edge of catastrophe
— almost everyone, that is, except the Germans themselves and, it turns
out, the Romney economic team.

Needless to say, this bodes ill if Mr. Romney wins in November. For all
indications are that his idea of smart policy is to double down on the very
spending cuts that have hobbled recovery here and sent Europe into an
economic and political tailspin.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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