Words&Dirt

“For Pham Nuwen, there was no pain. The last minutes of his life were beyond any description that might be rendered in the Slowness or even in the Beyond.

So try metaphor and simile: It was like…it was like…Pham stood with Old One on a vast and empty beach. Ravna and the Tines were tiny creatures at their feet. Planets and stars were the grains of sand. And the sea had drawn briefly back, letting the brightness of thought reach here where before had been darkness. The Transcendence would be brief. At the horizon, the drawn-back sea was building, a dark wall higher than any mountain, rushing back upon them. He looked up at the enormity of it. Pham and godshatter and Countermeasure would not survive that submergence, not even separately. They had triggered catastrophe beyond mind, a vast section of the Galaxy plunged into Slowness, as deep as Old Earth itself, and as permanent.”

––A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge, loc. 10215-23

“In addition to convincing the public of the gravity of the debt crisis and of the unreliability of social insurance, the austerity lobby’s grand strategy is to create bipartisan expert panels of fiscal conservatives to devise automatic triggers that put Congress on a certain path to deficit reduction. The concept, which dates back to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings formula from the 1980s, invariably includes trading higher taxes for cuts in social insurance. The most impressive convert to this view has been Barack Obama.

In the Obama era, there have been at least six such bodies, both private and official, including a high-profile commission appointed by the president. After the stimulus bill was enacted in February 2009, Obama pivoted from job creation and recovery to the cause of budget balance. On February 23, the president hosted a ‘fiscal responsibility summit’ at the White House, echoing the dubious economic premises of the austerity lobby. He declared:

If we confront this crisis without also confronting the deficits that helped cause it, we risk sinking into another crisis down the road as our interest payments rise, our obligations come due, confidence in our economy erodes, and our children and grandchildren are unable to pursue their dreams because they are saddled with our debts.

That is why today, I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of the my first term in office. This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we have long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt they cannot repay––and that means taking responsibility right now, in the Administration, for getting our spending under control.

Note these several fallacies. Deficits did not cause the economic crisis. Confidence in the economy has far more to do with whether we are on a path to recovery than with whether we are on a path to reduce debt. The horizons of our children and grandchildren will be more a reflection of the health of the real economy than of the ratio of national debt to GDP (which, remember, was at record levels during the postwar boom, America’s greatest era of high growth and shared prosperity). But Obama was now singing from the austerity hymnal, and among the pleased summiteers were Pete Peterson, David Walker, and the Concord Coalition’s Robert Bixby. Obama, in fact, did not cut the deficit in half by the end of his term, because slow growth kept deficits high. The actual deficit fell by about 31 percent. And it’s good that he didn’t cut it further. If the president had delivered on his deflationary pledge, the growth rate would have been even lower.”

––Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility, by Robert Kuttner, pg. 62-3