Drama Syriza

Image by Rainer Hachfeld via cagle.com.

Krugman offers a really helpful analogy for the Greek crisis from Weimar Germany, which we always remember for the hyperinflation of 1923 when we ought to be thinking of the terrible deflation brought on by the austerity policies (cutting wages and welfare payments, tightening credit, and raising taxes) of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in 1930-32, which was a decisive factor in bringing you-know-who into power in 1933. Austerity was a really bad idea for Germany, and has been a really bad idea for Greece so far.

An earlier and deeper cause of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, he goes on to note, was the terrible burden of debt imposed on Germany after the Great War by France and England under the terms of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, and the fruitless attempts of the Powers throughout the 1920s to collect this money (which they never came close to doing, even when French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr district in 1923-25 with the idea of taking it out directly in the form of coal).

Per austerum ad astra

Updated 4/24/2012

"Oil's up another $3 a barrel... Looks like we'll have to sell you, Bud!" "Aw, Dad, can't I just get a paper route?"

You know how they always say a country is just like a family, in that it has to gather around the kitchen table (well, OK, a family with an eat-in kitchen) and figure out what we need to give up in order to make ends meet? And we always say back that it's a stupid analogy, and end of conversation?

Maybe it's not the analogy that's the problem, but the way it's worked out. Not only is this imaginary family exceptional in the size of its kitchen, it's also exceptional in that it doesn't seem to have to consider the possibility of going into debt. "Oh, we'll trade in the Cadillac for a Subaru and send little Tyler to public school."

If you think of the family vertically, as a succession of generations, and not just as an island of Mom and Dad and the kids, then it's clear that most of us are in fact in a state of debt as permanent as the United States. As the older generation starts to slide out from under, the younger generation starts to slide in, with the school loans, and the car loan, and the credit cards, and ultimately the mortgage.

What we don't ever do if we can avoid it is decide Tyler can't afford to go to college so he'll have to stay home and pick peas, or we can't afford to redo the roof so we'll just have to let it slowly rot away. The boy is going to go to college so he can earn some real money and get out of our hair; the roof will get fixed so we can sell the damned house and move to Far Rockaway (I hope not!). We borrow money to guarantee a future in which we'll be able to pay it back and have some left over.

You can't make any money without spending some. You have to take a shower and put on some clothes before you go to the job interview. You have to do the rail network and the electricity grid and the education system before you can get growth. National austerity budgeting is like the couple in that ghastly Maupassant story that lost the diamond necklace, bought a replacement on credit and retired into obscure penury to spend the rest of their lives in menial jobs trying to pay it off. There's no way they're going to make enough money to pay off all the Euro banksters unless they show up in town ready to do business!

Cécile de France as Mathilde in La Parure for TV, by Claude Chabrol. From Linternaute Television.

Apparently people in the Netherlands don't like austerity for themselves nearly as much as they like it for others. As they howled about bailouts for those reprehensible countries in the south of Europe, the center-right Dutch government was overshooting the E.U. deficit targets by about 50% (it's supposed to stay under 3%, but is expected to rise to 4.6%). But the package of spending cuts and tax increases they proposed can't make it through Parliament, so the prime minister is going to have to visit the queen and there will be early elections, maybe in September.

The Czech center-right government looks set to collapse over an austerity program too. Their case is a little less bizarre than the Dutch one, which is complicated by the fact that the most right-wing party of all—the Freedom Party of Islamechthriac Geert Wilders—is the one that is toppling the government, presumably in the belief that they will do well in the elections, whereas the Czech voters are most likely to simply turn back to the good old center-left.

And it looks as if France is set to take a center-left turn, as you've no doubt heard by now, with the first round of the presidential elections going as expected to the Socialist candidate (not very Socialist, though perhaps well to the left of the party's lamented great rich hope, Dominique Strauss-Kahn) and the second round in two weeks not very likely to go to anybody else (although the scary right did much better than the real left).

And then, if experience is any indication, all the new center-left governments will roll up their sleeves and, sadly, implement some austerity programs, just as in Greece and (by then, no doubt) Spain, and get voted out for their trouble. Oh, well.

"Mr. Viguerie says if we get this batch out in time he'll send us a chicken on Reagan's birthday."

Update 4/24
The Times thinks austerity is going out of fashion all over Europe, as Spain goes back into recession and Timmy Geithner begs them to try some kind of stimulus:

“The formula is not working, and everyone is now talking about whether austerity is the only solution,” said Jordi Vaquer i Fanés, a political scientist and director of the Barcelona Center for International Affairs in Spain. “Does this mean that Merkel has lost completely? No. But it does mean that the very nature of the debate about the euro-zone crisis is changing.”

What a swell party this is!

Mélenchon remplit sa plage! Today's rally in Marseille for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, French presidential candidate of the Front de Gauche, drew a crowd of 120,000—looks like holding it on the beach was a smart idea. What a swell party this is.

A bit of a setback in Egypt in the news that the Supreme Presidential Election Commission, presumably military-run, has barred ten candidates from the election, including some we don't like—the hard-line Salafist Hazem Abu Ismail whose mother became a US citizen before she died, and the Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. No reasons were given, according to the Guardian, but the New York Times speculates that in the cases of the likewise barred Muslim Brotherhood candidate Khairat el-Shater and the classy old liberal Ayman Nour it was their prison records.

And how did they get prison records? Jailed by Mubarak, of course, for political activity. They can't run for president because the disgraced criminal ex-dictator didn't like their politics! Looks like premature anti-fascism is still a crime, and that can't be good news.

From The Albinophant blog.

Here's another depressing little irony: Guess who doesn't like austerity, in Italy and Ireland? Small-business owners and entrepreneurs, and it's not very funny, either, because they're killing themselves: unable to pay their debts in County Cork (190 suicides from 2008 to 2011), creditors of a deadbeat government in the Veneto (more than 30 small-business suicides in the past three years). All those job creators just need to man up a little, I guess. Look at Mitt Romney! He doesn't whine.

Why is this man smiling? Photo by Sean Gardner/Reuters.

The presumptive Republican presidential candidate couldn't get his taxes done on time, though!  He's filed an extension, the same day Barack Obama and Joe Biden publicly released their 2011 returns. Luckily, he'll totally get it done before the election.

"Earlier this year, Gov. Romney released his 2010 tax return and an estimate of his 2011 income and taxes.  This is an extension for filing his 2011 actual return, similar to what he has done in prior years," Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement. "Sometime in the next six months, and prior to the election, Gov. Romney will file and release the 2011 return when there is sufficient information to provide an accurate return."

The Romneys estimate a total tax liability of $3,226,623 for 2011, according to Saul. They made payments of $3,434,411 in 2011. They made an estimated payment of $887,000 for 2012.

Naturally Obama has it easier—he works for the government, doesn't he? Just goes to show how out of touch Obama really is.

But what if it doesn't know it's dead?

Richard Eskow's history of austerity economics  over the past couple of years (read the whole thing!) claims that that zombie theory is dead, defunct, no longer with us:

The name of the deceased was "Austerity Economics," and it was first glimpsed in a 1921 paper by conservative economist Frank Wright. Austerity died of natural causes brought on by prolonged exposure to reality.

But the thing about zombies is--well, you know what the thing about zombies is. They're dead already. According to Wikipedia, what you need to do is feed them with salt. Any ideas?

I call the round things "wheels"

Woke up to hear an echo of a Marketplace story I missed yesterday morning, about a new fear of European economists: It seems somebody is worried that all that austerity might inhibit growth. Golly, whoever imagined such an idea?*

In other news, I've figured out how to make sleds that work in the summer. Instead of mounting them on runners, you mount them on axles, one in the front and one in the back, and then each axle is propped up in turn on these round things, so that when you pull it it just rolls.

*I mean, other than most economists over the past 80 years or so.