BRIEF: Chainsaw austerity
Big thought, small step, deep breath — for March 13, 2025
BIG THOUGHT.
Austerity in America?
You may wonder why an incoming presidential administration would be willing to trash an economy that only months ago was the “envy of the world.” But that’s where we are, in a trade war against our allies, a stock market in steep decline, and a recession on the horizon. And for what, exactly?
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said something on CNBC the other day which hints at an explanation:
There's going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending; the market and the economy have just become hooked. We've become addicted to this government spending, and there's going to be a detox period.
Hooked? Addicted?
This recalls an argument conservatives have been making against “welfare” for decades: that recipients are addicts, that public assistance is not just unhelpful, but bad for people, a substance abuse problem that keeps them out of the market economy. As sociologist Christopher Jencks has written, since the 1970s, that line of thought has biased Americans against all public spending: “The idea that government action could solve—or even ameliorate—social problems became unfashionable, and federal spending was increasingly seen as waste.”
Bessent is in that tradition, arguing that Americans are junkies, addicted to public money. And he’s prescribing a dose of cold turkey to free us from all that wasteful spending. There’s a term for that kind of economic policy: austerity.
That’s the context in which DOGE’s haphazard chainsaw massacre of government agencies makes a sort of sense. It may seem pointlessly destructive to disable the institutions that work to make lives at home and abroad better, but if the goal — however poorly thought out — is to achieve the libertarian dream of large-scale privatization, it tracks with the moves to cut popular programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
Speaking of chainsaws, that starts to look a bit like what Elon Musk’s fellow chainsaw enthusiast and DOGE inspiration Javier Milei has been doing in Argentina as he’s traded the country’s steep inflation for a painful recession, slashing spending, halting in-progress public projects, defunding scientific research, starving the universities, cutting pensions — it’s probably a familiar list. And lately it looks like a poverty rate of 53 percent, and retirees fighting police in the streets.
What does an austerity program look like in the United States? That isn’t so clear — the poverty rate in the U.S. has been just over 11 percent, and inflation, while painful, has never been anywhere near as extreme as in Argentina. But the measures the Trump-Musk administration has been pursuing aren’t even aimed at reducing inflation. Some, like tariffs, are likely to worsen inflation.
But speaking to the Economic Club of New York, Bessent waved off the impact of inflation:
Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream. The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security.
Note he suggests that any citizen can achieve prosperity — not every citizen. And not everyone can succeed in a society based on competition, especially when it isn’t quite fair to begin with. Even in the enviable economy the U.S. had going up until this year, it already had the worst income inequality of the G7 countries. So if we’re going to exacerbate those problems by making the market economy harder for people, with higher prices and more unemployment, even while we pull away what remains of the social safety net — that poses some big questions.
What is the economy for, exactly? What is government for? Isn’t the point to make life possible for every citizen, to take care of the things the market can’t handle? And if people are meant to endure short-term pain for some future goal (bringing manufacturing jobs back, they say), what exactly is it that makes it worth giving up on the idea of public goods altogether?
In Secondhand Time, her oral history of the former Soviet Union’s shock transition to capitalism after 1991, the Nobel-winning journalist Svetlana Alexievich tells the stories of dozens who sacrificed everything under communism. But even after years of hunger, or surveillance, terms in the labor camps, the idea that they were working for one another, towards the grand collective goal of a socialist utopia — kept them going. What came after was worse, because it meant that sacrifice had amounted to nothing. Freedom didn’t deliver. They had sacrificed everything for somebody else’s benefit, and gotten nothing in return.
Then something happened.. We came down to earth. The happiness and euphoria suddenly broke. Into a million little pieces. I quickly realized that the new world wasn't mine, it wasn't for me. It required another breed of person. Kick the weak in the eyes! They raised the ones from the bottom up to the top... All in all, it was a revolution ... But this time, with worldly ends: a vacation home and a car for everyone. Isn't that a little petty? The streets were filled with these bruisers in tracksuits. Wolves! They came after everyone.
SMALL STEP
Shutdown homestretch
California Senator Adam Schiff posted a video late last night explaining Senate Democrats’ current thinking on the budget the House passed earlier this week — and their plans to oppose it. It looks like the critical vote is happening Friday, so today’s the perfect time (and the last chance, at least in this round) to call your Democratic senators to convince them to do the right thing. There’s a helpful script up at Indivisible.
DEEP BREATH
Point of view
Novelist Rebecca Makkai offers her writing advice over at SubMakk, but even if you don’t write, a lot of it is great advice for reading, and living, and it’s all well worth taking to heart.
A few weeks back, Makkai took a deep dive into the problem of establishing point of view. And in the techniques for creating characters, she finds a key to the practice of understanding other minds, of empathy — something the country lacks right now, and something we can all stand to develop further.
We can debate all day to what extent fiction and memoir develop empathy in readers, but just about every study suggests that they do. I’d argue that since it’s the only experience we regularly undertake in which we’re asked to consider life from a different point of view (not as a voyeur, like in film, but as the person in question, or with access to different people’s thoughts), reading is the best tool we have for building and extending that ability to imagine life from another perspective.
A programming note: Join us Live today with Rebecca Solnit!
Today, Thursday, March 13, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern we’ll be speaking with the visionary writer, thinker, and activist Rebecca Solnit, and we hope to see everyone there! You won’t want to miss this one.
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
Reassuring to see your perspective on the persuasive power of memoir and fiction. Puts not a little fire in the belly of those of us who have stories aching to be told.
Animal Farm. We are living Orwell's Animal Farm, which I found myself recently re-reading. Sprang to mind with Svetlana Alexievich's quote. And speaking of the power of storytelling.